To understand and prevent the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers are working at a rapid clip and in order to make research findings available quickly, many researchers are publishing versions of papers that have not yet been peer reviewed.

To combat this, MIT Press and the University of California, Berkeley, have launched a new COVID-19 journal; one that will peer review pre-print articles getting a lot of attention,  elevating the good research and debunking the bad.

The Rapid Reviews: COVID-19 (RR:C19), is an open access journal that will accelerate peer review of COVID-19-related research and deliver real-time, verified scientific information that policymakers and health leaders can use. Unlike a traditional journal, authors will not submit their work for review, instead, the Rapid Reviews team will select and review already-published pre-print articles in a matter of days, a publishing model known as an overlay journal. 

The reviewers behind RR:C19 will use artificial intelligence tools to scour preprint servers for promising scholarship, commission peer reviews and publish results PubPub - an open-source publishing platform for collaboratively editing and publishing journals, monographs, and other open access scholarly content,

The editor-in-chief of the journal, Stefano Bertozzi of the University of California, notes that there is an urgent need to validate–or debunk–the rapidly growing volume of COVID-19 related manuscripts on preprint servers. “There is such a huge volume of material every day, our goal is to do rapid reviews on pre-prints that are most interesting,” he added.

The project made possible by a $350,000 grant from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation plans to tap a pool of 1,600 potential reviewers from hundreds of institutions, and will analyze papers on the economics and anthropology of the pandemic as well as biomedicine. It also plans to publish original research from areas of the world that have been underrepresented in Western journals.

RR:C19 will publish its first reviews mid July 2020 and is actively recruiting potential reviewers and contributors. Click here if you are interested in contributing to the journal.

Photo courtesy / MIT press

Article by Jedidah Mwangi

https://rapidreviewscovid19.mitpress.mit.edu/