The name of the game in COVID-19 research has been speed. With the situation being everchanging and on the minds of both experts and laypeople, authors are trying to publish their latest COVID-19 studies as quickly as possible before scientific consensus changes. However, anyone who works in peer review knows that the goal is to review and publish a manuscript as quickly as possible, but reality and working conditions can sometimes necessitate a slightly longer reviewing period than what is desirable for authors. This need for speed has opened the door for predatory publishing tactics to make their presence felt on the academic publishing stage.
Predatory publishing is nothing new. We wrote about it here, but the current pandemic has really opened the door for predatory publishing practices to flourish. The public is consistently clamoring for research related to the virus as they attempt to safely navigate the new world we live in. According to LitCovid, a site devoted to tracking the latest research on COVID-19, close to 50,000 articles relevant to the coronavirus have been posted to PubMed with the peak of publication occurring in late May. At the same time, over 6,000 preprints have been reported on various servers between January and April.
The speed with which these articles have been processed and published has led some to question whether they went through rigorous peer review. Article processing times have seemingly been dramatically cut in an effort to quickly get research out to the public that may also draw increased attention to the journal. The questionable quality of this peer review is amplified by the fact that many of these manuscripts are being published as open access manuscripts or being posted to preprint servers well before publication, leading to them occasionally being picked up by major media outlets.
An article was published in India in January of 2020 that presented similarities between the coronavirus and HIV. The research was criticized by many scientists and experts and was quickly retracted, but it was tweeted about more than 17,000 times and was picked up by 25 different news outlets. Another paper that was published online in January in the Journal of Medical Virology became infamously known as the “snake paper” and argued that initial outbreaks of COVID-19 in China were related to a snake flu. It was eventually scrutinized by experts but not until after it was picked up on social media. And in August, The Asian Journal of Medicine and Health published an inaccurate report claiming that hydroxychloroquine (a drug that early research suggested could aid in COVID-19 treatment) could prevent push-scooter accidents. The paper was retracted after it was determined to be a joke with a fake first author, but the journal that published it claimed it went through peer review before being published online.
The importance of peer review and trusting its validity has never been greater than in a pandemic. The fact that the public is following research and publication on COVID-19 closely right now only amplifies the need for thorough peer review. Government policy and personal actions are being dictated by this research, so when an unsubstantiated study is published without going through proper review channels and picked up by the echo chamber of social and mass media, it could put innocent people in harm’s way.
