Pandemic Publishing: Medical journals drastically speed up their publication process for Covid-19

Serge P.J.M. Horbach

In these times of crisis, the rapid dissemination of relevant academic knowledge is of paramount importance. Several stakeholders have already warned for a 'fake-news pandemic' spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories through social media channels in the absence of established . CC-BY 4.0 International license author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.18.045963 doi: bioRxiv preprint scientific knowledge (Khatri et al., 2020; UNESCO, 2020) . To assist policymakers and clinical experts, as well as to counter the spread of such disinformation, researchers and academic journals have a responsibility to share available knowledge quickly. The fact that medical journals have managed to considerably speed up their publication process for Covid-19 related content during the current pandemic is therefore laudable. However, some concerns remain about whether faster dissemination might go at the expense of research quality. Quickly spreading false information might do more harm than slowly spreading reliable knowledge.