Preprints Are Still a Mess
A conspiracist uses a preprint vastly improved by a journal to complain about his conspiracy
I’ve lightened up on complaining about preprints, but that’s not because they’re not still terrible. I’m just aware it gets tedious — for all of us.
- Knowing what we know, we’re still dressing these things up with DOIs and HTML like they’re real papers? Making them citable? Archiving them for years, if not permanently? Putting them in search engines? Are we even paying attention to our role in society?
It’s all fairly ridiculous for an industry that’s supposedly about separating wheat from chaff before moving things to the professional and public interface, especially because so many preprints are shoddy and half-baked, and many are used to feed conspiracies.
Case in point — a complaint via a conspiracist’s Substack (“sanityunleashed” — very reassuring) that a preprint with the “peer-reviewed version in Nature” (it was actually published in Scientific Reports) where the authors claim they “had to take the vax injured out of the paper to get it through peer review.”
The preprint was posted on Research Square in April 2022. It was indexed at the time in Europe PMC, but not in PubMed or PubMed Central. So, it’s been discoverable for nearly three years.