Preprint publishing challenges the status quo in medicine

“I expect we will be turning the clock back 5 years and find a lot of people who think this is potentially a bad thing, a risk that poor information or misinformation is going to be disseminated to a wider audience, which is exactly what we heard about bioRxiv,” he said. “But we hope that when medRxiv launches, it will demonstrate the same kind of gradual acceptance as people get more and more familiar with the preprint platform.”

The founders intend to build into the server policies to mitigate the risk from medically relevant information that hasn’t been peer reviewed, such as not accepting case studies or editorials and opinion pieces, he added.

While many find the preprint disclaimer acceptable on papers that have no immediate clinical impact, there is concern about applying it to papers that discuss patient treatment.

Howard Bauchner, MD, JAMA’s editor in chief, addressed it in an editorial published in September 2017. Although not explicitly directed at bioRxiv, Dr. Bauchner took a firm stance against shortcutting the evaluation of evidence that is often years in the making.