Preprinting the COVID-19 pandemic
AbstractThe world continues to face an ongoing viral pandemic that presents a serious threat to human health. The virus underlying the COVID-19 disease, SARS-CoV-2, caused over 29 million confirmed cases and 925,000 deaths since January 2020. Although the last pandemic occurred only a decade ago, the way science operates and responds to current events has experienced a paradigm shift in the interim. The scientific community responded rapidly to the COVID-19 pandemic, releasing over 16,000 COVID-19 scientific articles within 4 months of the first confirmed case, of which 6,753 were hosted by preprint servers. Focussing on bioRxiv and medRxiv, two growing preprint servers for biomedical research, we investigated the attributes of COVID-19 preprints, their access and usage rates and characteristics of sharing across online platforms. Our results highlight the unprecedented role of preprint servers in the dissemination of COVID-19 science, and the impact of the pandemic on the scientific communication landscape.