Is publishing unvetted clinical research a good idea?

A new website has been launched that enables clinicians to share their research results before peer review, with the goal of speeding up scientific discovery.

According to a June 6, 2019 article in Nature, some experts are concerned that publishing unvetted research, or “preprints,” on the website medRxiv could lead to patients or doctors acting on what could turn out to be inaccurate information.

Others think that publishing clinical research before the typically lengthy peer review process could be beneficial. Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said that the fast and free exchange of information is important during outbreaks of diseases such as Ebola or Zika.

Read the Nature article: How to bring preprints to the charged field of medicine