bioRxiv, which is operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, provides a free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences. Authors can post unreviewed preprints on bioRxiv, to make their findings immediately available to the scientific community and receive feedback on draft manuscripts before they are submitted to peer-reviewed journals. Are there negative aspects from preprint publication and if so what are they? How much does this help advance science and research efforts? What do you think?
As a novice contributor to the scientific community, I view the preprint system partly as a temporizing solution to the flaws of the institution that is the peer review. Pressing issues of the peer review that I can think of include the "lag period" from submission to rejection or acceptance (which is partly understandable) and a relatively small number of people (each with their own biases) who decide on the publication/rejection of a paper compared to the larger population who might find the study useful for whatever reason. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the need for timely information, at a rate that the conventional peer review system may likely not keep up with, hence we have seen an exponential rise of preprints recently.
The preprint system, however, seems to be a double-edged sword. At one end, it democratizes the dissemination of scholarly work, giving people absolute and timely access to the work which is otherwise impossible (due to several reasons including paywall or rejection by peer reviewers for reasons not related to ethical or severe methodological issues) and allows virtually anyone to scrutinize the work for various ends (e.g., to improve the paper or to use the information in the paper in their own decision-making).
On the other hand, preprints inherently require an elevated level of skepticism and depends highly on "good faith" by the authors. With regard to the former, unfortunately, not everyone can exercise adequate skepticism (which has led to instances such as preprints being reported in the media). With regard to the latter, it is difficult to rule out the likelihood that this mechanism will be taken advantage of by figures with malicious intent (fortunately, some preprint servers employ a screening process for this reason, although the effectiveness of that process remains to be evaluated).
All in all, I think that preprints advance good science at a greater extent than it slows it down. Nevertheless, the scientific community should strive to refine this system (maybe through development of guidelines of some sort) and the infrastructure that I think it responds to, which is the peer review.
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