LAUSR

Correspondence K. R. Camargo Jr. Departamento de Planejamento e Administração em Saúde, Instituto de Medicina Social, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. Rua São Francisco Xavier 524, Bloco D, 7o andar, Rio de Janeiro, RJ 20559-900, Brasil. [email protected] Preprints are “a form of a scholarly article which is not peer-reviewed yet but made available either as paper format or electronic copy” 1. After an early attempt by the U.S. National Institutes of Health in the early 1960s, this format really took hold in the early 1990s, first as an email server at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which later became a web service known as arXiv 1. In the following years, the number of both preprint servers and total preprints submitted to web services increased considerably, however, preprints are still a small fraction (6.4%) of the total output of scientific publication 1. Despite disagreements over whether this form of publication is actually beneficial or not, its advantages and problems present a high degree of convergence among advocates and detractors. On the one hand, preprint is beneficial because it is a quicker way to disseminate scientific content with open access to everyone; on the other hand, the lack of adequate vetting, especially for peer reviews, increases the risk of disseminating bad science and can lead to several problems 2. The dissent lies in considering to what extent possible risks overcome possible benefits (or vice versa). The argument about this rapid dissemination has strong supporting evidence. A study on preprint publication showed that preprint are published on average 14 months earlier than peer-reviewed journal articles 1. This is expected considering that the time-intensive process of peer reviews and revising manuscripts is totally bypassed. However, in this strength lies its very fragility: how to assure that this shorter process will not compromise the quality of the publication? ASAPbio (Accelerating Science and Publication in Biology) 3 is a group of biology researchers that promotes preprint publication and has produced a number of studies that attempt to allay concerns about its quality, claiming, for example, that published articles previously submitted to a preprint server did not show relevant changes for its publication 4. Authors from this group have argued that the current approaches to evaluate research and researchers hold back a more widespread adoption of the preprint methodology 5, which would explain its relatively small participation on the general panorama of scientific publication. Despite claims to the contrary, however, there are examples of poor studies published as preprints, which caused undesirable consequences in public health. Two methodologically flawed studies about a protective effect of tobacco smoking against COVID-19 (one of which has an author with known connections with the tobacco industry), for example, increased the commercialization of tobacco products in France and Iran 6 and a virology study that erroneously stated that the SARS-COV-2 virus had “HIV insertions” fueled conspiracy theories about the former virus being a bioweapon,