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Preprints Race COVID Breakthroughs - Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
webchanzuckerberg.com·chanzuckerberg.com/blog/preprints-race-covid-breakthroughs/
This CZI blog post covers open science and preprint publishing in the COVID-19 context; tangentially relevant to AI safety discussions about rapid capability deployment, information quality control, and the tradeoffs between speed and rigor in high-stakes research environments.
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Importance: 18/100blog postnews
Summary
This Chan Zuckerberg Initiative blog post examines how preprint servers accelerated scientific communication during the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing researchers to share findings before formal peer review. It highlights the role of rapid, open-access publishing in enabling faster public health responses and vaccine development. The piece also touches on the tradeoffs between speed and scientific rigor in crisis-driven research dissemination.
Key Points
- •Preprint servers like bioRxiv and medRxiv dramatically accelerated the sharing of COVID-19 research findings before peer review.
- •Rapid open-access publishing enabled faster coordination among global researchers and public health officials during the pandemic.
- •The COVID crisis exposed tradeoffs between publication speed and scientific quality control, raising questions about misinformation risks.
- •CZI supported open science infrastructure to facilitate faster, more accessible biomedical research dissemination.
- •The pandemic served as a stress test for scientific publishing norms, prompting ongoing debates about preprint reliability and peer review reform.
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Nov 2, 2021 ·
2 min read
# How Open, Early Sharing of Scientific Results Proved Crucial to COVID-19 Response
Preprints, or scientific papers shared prior to peer review, accelerate the pace of scientific discovery across the globe and will aid in future pandemic responses.
**Patricia Flores**
Tags: [COVID-19](https://chanzuckerberg.com/blog/category/covid-19/#posts), [Science](https://chanzuckerberg.com/blog/category/science/#posts), [Technology](https://chanzuckerberg.com/blog/category/technology/#posts)
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Science moves faster when it’s open and scientists, patients, and public health officials collaborate.
From the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, as researchers raced to better understand the new and emerging virus, they increasingly leaned on preprints, or scientific papers posted before peer review, to share their learnings in order to save time and build off each other’s work. Rapid, early sharing of scientific results helped the world understand and tackle the SARS-CoV-2 virus sooner than anyone ever imagined.
However, the race is not over. We need open science to better respond to future pandemics.
Open science — from scientific protocols to preprints to software code and more — increases transparency and the pace of research. Preprints, in particular, enable sharing of ideas and collaboration across scientific disciplines much faster than traditional communication. They also enable scientists to vet results and improve research in the open.
But no individual can do this alone. Scientists need preprint archives and repositories such as [bioRxiv](https://www.biorxiv.org/ "BioRxiv (Opens in a new window)"), an initiative of [Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory](https://www.cshl.edu/ "Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (Opens in a new window)") (CSHL); and [medRxiv](https://www.medrxiv.org/ "MedRxiv (Opens in a new window)"), a collaboration between the CSHL, [Yale University](https://news.yale.edu/2020/06/06/preprint-server-health-science
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