Peer review, preprints and the speed of science

Peer review is often claimed to be the guarantor of the trustworthiness of scientific papers, but it is a troubled process. Preprints offer a way out

A few weeks ago my collaborators and I submitted our latest paper to a scientific journal. We have been investigating how noroviruses subvert the molecular machinery of infected cells and have some interesting results. If it passes peer review, our paper could be published in three or four months' time. If it's rejected, we may have to re-work the manuscript before trying our luck with another journal. That will delay publication even further - it's not unheard of for papers to take a year or more to get out of the lab and into the world, even in the digital age.

But you can read our paper today, for free, because we have uploaded it as a preprint to the bioRxiv (pronounced 'bio-archive'). This was an unusual thing for us to do. Preprints are a relatively new thing for life scientists, though the arXiv ('archive') preprint server has been in use in many fields of physics, mathematics and computer science for over 20 years. To be honest, it felt odd to be publishing without the comfort blanket of peer review. We went ahead anyway because preprints are part of the solution to the troubled state of research publication and we want to see more scientists publishing by this route.