Describing the Landscape of Medical Education Preprints on MedRxiv: Current Trends and Future Recommendations.

PURPOSE: A preprint is a version of a research manuscript posted to a preprint server prior to peer review. Preprints enable authors to quickly and openly share research, afford opportunities for expedient feedback, and enable immediate listing of research on grant and promotion applications. In medical education, most journals welcome preprints, which suggests preprints play a role in the field's discourse. Yet, little is known about medical education preprints, including author characteristics, preprint use, and ultimate publication status. This study provides an overview of preprints in medical education to better understand their role in the field's discourse. METHOD: The authors queried medRxiv, a preprint repository, to identify preprints categorized as "medical education" and downloaded related metadata. CrossRef was queried to gather information on preprints later published in journals. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. RESULTS: Between 2019 and 2022, 204 preprints were classified in medRxiv as "medical education," with most deposited in 2021 (n = 76, 37.3%). On average, preprint full-texts were downloaded 1,875.2 times, and all were promoted on social media. Preprints were authored, on average, by 5.9 authors. Corresponding authors were based in 41 countries, with 45.6% in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. Almost half (n = 101, 49.5%) became published articles in predominantly peer-reviewed journals. Preprints appeared in 65 peer-reviewed journals, with BMC Medical Education (n = 9, 8.9%) most represented. CONCLUSIONS: Medical education research is being deposited as preprints, which are promoted, heavily accessed, and subsequently published in peer-reviewed journals, including medical education journals. Considering the benefits of preprints and the slowness of medical education publishing, it is likely that preprint depositing will increase and preprints will be integrated into the field's discourse. The authors propose next steps to facilitate responsible and effective creation and use of preprints.

Gates foundation places bold bet on preprints.

Funder to mandate preprints and no longer pay open-access publishing fees for grantees.

Reimagining bioRxiv and preprint servers as platforms for academic learning.

A popular preprint server, bioRxiv, is important as a tool for increased visibility for life science research. If used properly, however, bioRxiv can also be an important tool for training, as it may expose trainees (degree-seeking students undertaking research or internships directly related to their field of study) to the peer review process. Here, we offer a comprehensive guide to using bioRxiv as a training tool, as well as offer suggestions for improvements in bioRxiv, including confusion that may be caused by bioRxiv articles appearing on PubMed.

Recommendations for accelerating open preprint peer review to improve the culture of science.

Peer review is an important part of the scientific process, but traditional peer review at journals is coming under increased scrutiny for its inefficiency and lack of transparency. As preprints become more widely used and accepted, they raise the possibility of rethinking the peer-review process. Preprints are enabling new forms of peer review that have the potential to be more thorough, inclusive, and collegial than traditional journal peer review, and to thus fundamentally shift the culture of peer review toward constructive collaboration. In this Consensus View, we make a call to action to stakeholders in the community to accelerate the growing momentum of preprint sharing and provide recommendations to empower researchers to provide open and constructive peer review for preprints.

Comment on Naef, R.; Acree, W.E., Jr. Calculation of the Three Partition Coefficients logPow, logKoa and logKaw of Organic Molecules at Standard Conditions at Once by Means of a Generally Applicable Group Additivity Method. Preprints2023, 2023120275.

Next to the paper referred to in the title [...].

Preprint: Global, and local optimization beamforming for broadband sources.

This paper presents an alternative energy function for global optimization (GO) beamforming, tailored to acoustic broadband sources. Given that properties, such as the source location, multipole rotation, or flow conditions, are parameterized over the frequency, a cross spectral matrix-fitting can be performed for all frequencies at once. A numerical analysis shows that the nonlinear energy function for the standard GO problem is equivalent to the source's point spread function (PSF) and contains local minima at the locations of the grating lobes and side lobes. The energy function is improved with the proposed broadband energy, as it averages the PSF. Further, it simplifies the process of identifying sources and reconstructing their spectra from the results. The paper shows that the method is superior on synthetic monopoles compared to standard GO and CLEAN based on source coherence (CLEAN-SC). For real-world data, the results of the proposed method and CLEAN-SC are similar, and outperform standard GO. The main difference is that source assumption violations cause noisy maps for CLEAN-SC and cause wrong spectral estimations of the proposed method. By using reasonable initial values, the GO problem reduces to a local optimization problem with similar results. Further, the proposed method is able to identify synthetic multipoles with different pole amplitudes and unknown pole rotations.

Comparison of effect estimates between preprints and peer-reviewed journal articles of COVID-19 trials.

BACKGROUND: Preprints are increasingly used to disseminate research results, providing multiple sources of information for the same study. We assessed the consistency in effect estimates between preprint and subsequent journal article of COVID-19 randomized controlled trials. METHODS: The study utilized data from the COVID-NMA living systematic review of pharmacological treatments for COVID-19 (covid-nma.com) up to July 20, 2022. We identified randomized controlled trials (RCTs) evaluating pharmacological treatments vs. standard of care/placebo for patients with COVID-19 that were originally posted as preprints and subsequently published as journal articles. Trials that did not report the same analysis in both documents were excluded. Data were extracted independently by pairs of researchers with consensus to resolve disagreements. Effect estimates extracted from the first preprint were compared to effect estimates from the journal article. RESULTS: The search identified 135 RCTs originally posted as a preprint and subsequently published as a journal article. We excluded 26 RCTs that did not meet the eligibility criteria, of which 13 RCTs reported an interim analysis in the preprint and a final analysis in the journal article. Overall, 109 preprint-article RCTs were included in the analysis. The median (interquartile range) delay between preprint and journal article was 121 (73-187) days, the median sample size was 150 (71-464) participants, 76% of RCTs had been prospectively registered, 60% received industry or mixed funding, 72% were multicentric trials. The overall risk of bias was rated as 'some concern' for 80% of RCTs. We found that 81 preprint-article pairs of RCTs were consistent for all outcomes reported. There were nine RCTs with at least one outcome with a discrepancy in the number of participants with outcome events or the number of participants analyzed, which yielded a minor change in the estimate of the effect. Furthermore, six RCTs had at least one outcome missing in the journal article and 14 RCTs had at least one outcome added in the journal article compared to the preprint. There was a change in the direction of effect in one RCT. No changes in statistical significance or conclusions were found. CONCLUSIONS: Effect estimates were generally consistent between COVID-19 preprints and subsequent journal articles. The main results and interpretation did not change in any trial. Nevertheless, some outcomes were added and deleted in some journal articles.

Framing COVID-19 Preprint Research as Uncertain: A Mixed-Method Study of Public Reactions.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, journalists were encouraged to convey uncertainty surrounding preliminary scientific evidence, including mentioning when research is unpublished or unverified by peer review. To understand how public audiences interpret this information, we conducted a mixed method study with U.S. adults. Participants read a news article about preprint COVID-19 vaccine research in early April 2021, just as the vaccine was becoming widely available to the U.S. public. We modified the article to test two ways of conveying uncertainty (hedging of scientific claims and mention of preprint status) in a 2 × 2 between-participants factorial design. To complement this, we collected open-ended data to assess participants' understanding of the concept of a scientific preprint. In all, participants who read hedged (vs. unhedged) versions of the article reported less favorable vaccine attitudes and intentions and found the scientists and news reporting less trustworthy. These effects were moderated by participants' epistemic beliefs and their preference for information about scientific uncertainty. However, there was no impact of describing the study as a preprint, and participants' qualitative responses indicated a limited understanding of the concept. We discuss implications of these findings for communicating initial scientific evidence to the public and we outline important next steps for research and theory-building.