New journal will vet Covid-19 preprints

Scientists, public health experts, and reporters may soon have an easier time parsing through the many preprints that have emerged on Covid-19 in the wake of the pandemic. MIT Press is launching today a new open access journal — called Rapid Reviews: Covid-19 — with the specific aim of vetting non-peer-reviewed papers that appear on servers such bioRxiv and medRxiv for credibility and possible instances of misinformation. “Preprints have been a tremendous boon for scientific communication, but they come with some dangers, as we’ve seen with some that have been based on faulty methods,” Nick Lindsay, director of journals at the MIT Press, tells STAT's Sharon Begley. One such preprint, which was later withdrawn, suggested that the coronavirus had somehow been engineered from HIV. “We want to debunk research that’s poor and elevate research that’s good,” Lindsay says