CAMBRIDGE (RPT) – A new study has found that a growing number of scientists are relying on preprint servers, such as medRxiv and bioRxiv to disseminate their research, and that the papers being published are “not as good as peer reviewed papers” that are published in traditional academic journals. “It’s common sense, really,” the first author of the paper told RPT, “if you don’t have to jump through a bunch of semi-arbitrary hoops to please a few chronically fatigued and unpaid reviewers, the papers just aren’t going to be as good.”
After frustration with how long the peer review process was taking - because their paper was “not actually based on analyzing any data” and appeared to be “a semi-sensical rant” with “no grounding in actual findings” - the authors decided to post their paper, along with the reviews, on a preprint server (from which RPT extracted the above quotes). The authors also issued a press release about their paper, which the senior author posted on her low-visibility blog.
This comes amidst a growing frustration with the peer review process, including the fact that some online submission portals at peer review journals are apparently portals to the underworld. There have been several attempts to reform the peer review process in recent months, including implementing a carrier pigeon model for manuscript dissemination, yet there is still worry among many that the peer review process will collapse because professors simply have more important things to do than read papers that insufficiently cite their work.
