Preprints Involving Medical Research—Do the Benefits Outweigh the Challenges?

Abstract

They can be cited and indexed and increasingly are given attention in the news and social media. 1 In clinical medicine, the ultimate aim of research is to improve patient outcomes and public health.Whether preprint posting and rapid dissemination of non-peer-reviewed reports of medical research that could have important clinical implications and consequences help achieve the goal of improving health outcomes for patients without causing harm remains uncertain.Preprint servers, which are increasing in number, host and archive preprint manuscripts.Considered the first preprint server, arXiv was launched in 1991 for physics researchers to share scientific reports with each other before journal publication.2 Before that, in 1961, the US National Institutes of Health began a preprint program for sharing biological preprints, known as Information Exchange Groups, but this program was discontinued in 1967 after journals refused to consider submissions previously posted as preprints.3 In 2013, bioRxiv was launched for preprints in biology and the life sciences, and in 2019, medRxiv, dedicated to health sciences, began.As of September 2020, there were at least 61 public preprint servers covering many disciplines; one-third (21) of these have been launched since 2018, and an increasing number permit the posting of preprints in medicine and health.4 Preprint servers are managed and supported by a range of financial models, including support from professional societies, nongovernmental organizations, foundations, and funders, and more recently, large publishers, and some servers require a fee for preprint posting.In this issue of JAMA, Malički and colleagues 5 report a cross-sectional analysis of 57 of the largest open (not funderassociated) preprint servers and identified 10 that have posted more than 500 preprints in the health sciences.The authors analyzed the policies of preprint servers that included screening before posting, submission requirements, and 18 recommendations on transparency in reporting and research integrity (eg, data sharing; addressing plagiarism,