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Will the pandemic permanently alter scientific publishing?

The push for rapid and open publishing could take off — although financial pressures lie ahead: part 4 in a series on science after the pandemic.
  1. Ewen Callaway
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Cartoon showing a stack of papers with a keyhole at the centre vs a stack of papers with a person entering the centre one

Illustration by The Project Twins

Anna Obenauf had never posted her results to a preprint server, but she decided to make the jump in April. She was racing against another team to get findings on a rare skin cancer out quickly, so she uploaded her manuscript to bioRxiv — just like thousands of COVID-19 researchers have been doing during this pandemic. It was a turning point for Obenauf, a cancer biologist at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, who particularly liked the quick feedback she received (L. Leiendecker et al. Preprint at bioRxiv http://doi.org/dw3f; 2020). She says she will probably continue to post some of her team’s work on preprint servers in the future.

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Nature 582, 167-168 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01520-4

Updates & Corrections

  • Clarification 16 June 2020: An earlier version of this story omitted to name Hindawi as a prominent publisher in the rapid-review system initiative.

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