“The current public-health emergency has, however, turbocharged all this. With physicians, policymakers and prime ministers all needing the latest science in order to make immediate life-and-death decisions, speed has become paramount. Journals have responded to sharp rises in submissions by working overtime. In so doing they have squeezed their normal processes down to days or weeks….

In the view of many, though, this is not enough. These people support a different way of disseminating scientific information—one that dethrones the journals by making journal publication an optional extra rather than a researcher’s primary goal. This model of scientific publishing relies on online repositories called preprint servers, on which papers can be posted swiftly and with only minimal formalities. Mathematicians and physicists already use them widely. Biologists increasingly do so too. Covid-19, however, has seen a step-change. Around half of the available scientific work on the pandemic has been released through preprint servers. The hope of preprinting’s supporters is that this will make the shift to using them irreversible….

This increased speed shows that scientists have learned from their sluggish responses to previous outbreaks. In an analysis of research carried out during and after the Ebola outbreak of 2014-16 and the Zika outbreak of 2015-16, Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at Harvard now working on covid-19, looked at just how sluggish those responses were. He found that, where preprints had been available, they appeared around 100 days before journal articles that had eventually been published on the same work. Unfortunately, less than 5% of all the journal articles published about the two outbreaks had been preprinted….”