Rumors or the Wave of the Future? Who Should Climb on the Preprint Bandwagon?

The preprint that launched a thousand prints? Nobel laureate Carol Greider’s posting on BioRxiv even caught the eye of the New York Times.

Suddenly preprints are the hot new way for biologists to share their research. Preprint servers allow researchers to post research and get feedback before publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Advocates say that preprints speed the progress of research by sharing information at once without the delays of the peer-review process, especially in urgent areas of research such as the Zika virus.

Preprint servers have been the norm in physics for years and now, say advocates, it’s time for biology to get on board. Three years ago, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory set up bioRxiv (pronounced “bio-archive”), a preprint server expressly for biology. In February after Nobel laureate, Johns Hopkins University professor, and ASCB member Carol Greider posted her latest paper on bioRxiv, the media finally took note. Harold Varmus, another Nobel winner and former head of the NIH National Cancer Institute, has become an outspoken advocate for preprint publication. Yet the idea of making “unvetted” research available to anyone with Internet access concerns some researchers who fear that preprints will become conduits for sloppy, misleading, or false science. The news media, they warn, will go wild.

The classic example, say preprint critics, is the notorious 1998 paper published in The Lancet that purported to link the MMR vaccine to autism. The paper, which was later retracted, lives on in the ranks of the “anti-vaxxer” movement as published “proof” of the link. Proponents of preprint publication point out the vaxxer paper appeared in a peer-reviewed, high profile journal, as did the retraction. Still are preprints a good thing for cell biologists? Should those outside of science—the public, the news media, and the social media—look to preprints for the latest research?

“The audience of preprint should be different than (that for) a paper. It’s fundamentally a different thing,” said Jessica Polka, Harvard University postdoc and ASCB member. “I don’t think we as scientists should promote preprints like a journal article.” Polka was an organizer of the ASAPBio (Accelerating Science and Publishing in Biology) meeting held in February at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute headquarters in Silver Spring, MD, to discuss the future of preprints in biology. Still, Polka doesn’t believe that preprints should be completely off-limits to the public or the media either. “If a journalist were to report on a preprint, it would be great if they conducted their own peer-review, by getting in-depth feedback from experts about the preprint,” said Polka.

Just because a paper is peer-reviewed doesn’t mean that it’s true, Polka pointed out. “Equating peer-review with truth has gotten us in trouble,” she said, “The vaccine paper was peer-reviewed.” That’s not to say Polka doesn’t see the benefit of peer-review. “I do value some proxy for trust, [because] at the end of the day, we don’t have a culture of reading critically. One thing that excites me is the possibility for a comment [on a preprint] to actually improve the manuscript. If you find bad stuff in a [peer-reviewed] paper now, there’s nothing you can do about it, but with preprints you can improve the quality in addition to the peer-review process,” she said.

“If the press is going to scan [preprint] content for interesting articles, they have to be aware of the difference between something that’s peer-reviewed versus not peer-reviewed. Peer-review is not a perfect filter, but it does improve the quality,” said David Drubin, professor at University of California, and Editor-in-Chief of the ASCB peer-reviewed journal Molecular Biology of the Cell (MBoC) However Drubin sees the advantages to preprints. “It can take a really long time to get something in press, sometimes it’s because there’s a flaw in the work, sometimes it’s because you submit something to several different journals. But one of the biggest grumbles is that some of the stuff you’re asked to do [in the peer-review process] is dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, things which aren’t really changing the overall message from your research,” Drubin said.

Clinical studies haven’t yet arrived in preprints, Drubin pointed out. “Still, if it’s something like Zika virus that’s an immediate public threat, then other scientists could build off that work because it’s been made public [in a preprint]. You may be letting the press peek behind the scenes while this is all ongoing, but maybe that’s a price we have to pay.” There is another benefit for immediate public access to preprints, Drubin said. “It gives you a window into how science really works, bioRxiv and allows others allow you to post comments, and they allow versions. That shows the evolution of the papers, so you can see the process.”

Other scientists are worried about whether their preprint will be noticed at all, especially by other scientists. Preprint servers aren’t indexed in PubMed, don’t send out eTOCs (email table of contents), and don’t generate enough revenue to support marketing. However, preprint articles do come up in Google Scholar searches and Google alerts. None of this worries ASCB member Gary McDowell, a postdoc at Tufts University and a leader in the Future of Research organization. McDowell explains that he doesn’t post to a preprint server in hopes of attracting attention. “At least the preprint will serve as an open access version of my paper, if I publish in a journal with restricted access,” he said. But McDowell is glad that Nobel winners are drawing attention by posting on preprint servers. “You need famous people to do it to become a trend,” McDowell said.

Some scientists believe that the news media could report cautiously on research in preprints, though some journals don’t. In a recent editorial, Nature declared that, “Exposure of preprints on servers does not preempt their submission to this journal… But we do actively discourage prior exposure of results in the public media.” This policy could put scientists in a double bind, leaving them unable to answer questions about their own work in preprint form from journalists or peers, without incurring the wrath of Nature and other high-profile journals.

Polka has a different take. “We constrain the way we think about and do science to benefit the publishing system that we have. We shouldn’t have to sacrifice the open communication of our results,” said Polka. Open access for all is an important feature of preprints in her mind but at the end of the day, Polka believes, “I think [a preprint] should be treated as rumor.”