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

Serge P.J.M. Horbach

First, one could wonder whether faster is always better. Even though the two do not necessarily exclude each other, it seems reasonable that there is a balance, or perhaps even a trade-off, between speed and quality in peer review. Especially concerning the stage of review, legitimate concerns can be raised on whether speeding up the review process might harm the process' ability to filter incorrect or invalid findings. Such research slipping through peer review, might require corrections or retractions in the future. Given the potentially rapid uptake of medical knowledge in policy and clinical contexts, such corrections might come in too late as potential harm might have already been done. Commentators have raised this concern regarding the usage of information in preprints, but it similarly applies to journal articles. In fact, false information spreading through journal articles is arguably more damaging, since it has the appearance of being 'peer reviewed' and hence properly verified. Scholars have repeatedly warned that a substantial share of articles (hastily) published during this crisis, will require future corrections (Marcus & Oransky, 2020) . Formal expressions of concern -on papers used to make policy decisions -have already been issued (Voss, 2020) . Future research should therefore analyse whether shorter review processes during the Covid-19 pandemic have led to an increase in corrections or retractions of published articles.