Pandemic publishing: Medical journals strongly speed up their publication process for COVID-19

Serge P J M Horbach

doi:10.1162/qss_a_00076

Abstract

In times of public crises, including the current COVID-19 pandemic, rapid dissemination of relevant scientific knowledge is of paramount importance. The duration of scholarly journals’ publication process is one of the main factors that may hinder quick delivery of new information. Following initiatives of medical journals to accelerate their publication process, this study assesses whether medical journals have managed to speed up their publication process for coronavirus-related articles. It studies the duration of 14 medical journals’ publication processes both during and prior to the current pandemic. Assessing 669 articles, the study concludes that medical journals have indeed strongly accelerated their publication process for coronavirus-related articles since the outbreak of the pandemic: The time between submission and publication has decreased on average by 49%. The largest decrease in number of days between submission and publication of articles was due to a decrease in time required for peer review. For articles not related to COVID-19, no acceleration of the publication process is found. While the acceleration of the publication process is laudable from the perspective of quick information dissemination, it also may raise concerns relating to the quality of the peer review process and of the resulting publications.

Highlights

The world is facing an unprecedented health crisis affecting most parts of society
Our analysis indicates that the scholarly publishing enterprise has managed to drastically speed up the dissemination of Covid-19 related research material since the outbreak of the pandemic
Academic journals managed to decrease the duration of their publication process by 49%, or 57 days on average, which is a statistically relevant difference

Summary

Introduction

The world is facing an unprecedented health crisis affecting most parts of society. In these times, access to the most state-of-the-art scientific knowledge is paramount to tackling the crisis. Academic journals and scholarly publishers are called upon to make new knowledge openly available and deliver new insights quickly. Scientists all over the world have stepped in to do experiments, observational studies and new analyses as to obtain relevant information. Drug trials and vaccine creations do not happen overnight (Thorp, 2020). Once such information has been gathered, it needs to be disseminated to all those potentially in the position to use it, as quick as possible. Scholarly journals have been one of the main outlets to facilitate this (Horbach & Halffman, 2018)

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