Covid-19 causing a publishing sea change

Covid-19 is turning bioscience publishing on its head. Scientists are rapidly learning new information about the novel virus, and many are disseminating it through preprint servers, where scientists share their data before it’s been peer reviewed.

Notably, academic peer review seems to be supplanted by crowd-sourced review — through readers comments on the sites, or on social media platforms like Twitter, writes Jeffrey S. Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School. In fact, “medical and scientific Twitter” is a particularly powerful way to both share and debate findings. These tools, which are so important in battling the pandemic, could fundamentally change how science is shared, he writes.