Social Science Preprints in the Age of COVID-19

By Allison Leung

Preprints can represent a number of points on the timeline of scholarly communications, be it posted before submission to a journal or archived after a paper is already published, or even as an end goal itself. In the simpler times before COVID-19, an author may have decided to post a paper to a preprint server in order to get credit for research or get comments from other researchers before ultimately submitting to a journal. They then would have submitted their research to a journal and waited several months for their paper to go through peer review.

The popularity of preprints was born from people’s frustration with how slow peer review can be. In some ways, we accepted the slowness of peer review as a feature and not a bug. It takes time to find the right reviewers, time to carefully read the papers, and time to write up thoughtful reviews. A paper that crawled its way through peer review may have had a personal negative impact on an individual researcher. But there wasn’t necessarily a macro level impact on society, even if a very important paper took many months to be accepted.

And then COVID-19 happened. Overnight, there was an incredible need to get research published immediately. As millions became infected, economies came to a shuddering halt, and society transformed, the slowness of peer review began to feel like a liability. Research needed to be published because we needed that research to save lives, jobs, and schools.

Enter preprints. Preprints had been around for decades already but now, we had a ready-made solution to the problem of delayed COVID-19 research. Preprint servers all saw huge spikes in submissions as researchers raced to get their papers out. Much has been written about the explosion in life science and medical research, and with good reason, as the world was desperate to understand, treat, and control the virus. However, even Advance, SAGE’s own preprint server specializing in social science and humanities research, saw a 50% increase in submissions. Our own papers range from how COVID-19 impacts transportation, to the global effects of quarantine on mental health, the economy, unequal access to care, public policy, and education, just to name a few.  The race to understand this pandemic needs to extend beyond just understanding the biology of the disease but to the social, political, and economic impacts that COVID-19 will have for years to come.  Advance has already posted over 100 papers relating to COVID-19 and we are excited to see what other research will come our way.

But are preprints truly the savior that scholarly communications has been looking for? Preprints, for all of their benefits, also carry some risks — as we see with increased news reporting on preprints, sharing the findings of unvetted research with the lay public in a way that preprints weren’t necessarily intended to be shared. Though, it is not as if peer reviewed research is immune to this danger as well. Plenty of flawed, peer reviewed research, has also been reported on only to have the errors be discovered later. When done well, peer review can stop flawed research from publication and improve what is published. But peer review is not an infallible stamp of validation, and a single research paper isn’t an end point, but rather the starting point for future research.

Preprints allow a researcher to fail early, and transparently, and then fix those mistakes quickly. Unlike most journal articles, preprints allow for public commenting and the ability to easily revise a paper, giving the authors the ability to fix mistakes or add to a paper if new research comes to light. When handled appropriately, the speed of research dissemination via preprints can be a boon to society. As the consequences of COVID-19 continue their negative ripple effects through the world, we need more good research published quickly, and we also need more researchers commenting on and reviewing that research to make it better. Not only will the authors benefit, but readers and society will ultimately benefit as well.

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