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February 13, 2021 08:54 pm

Misleading Viral Claims Show Dangers of Preprint Servers, Researchers Warn

Scientific researchers worry that the capacity for spreading misinformation "goes far beyond the big-name social media sites," warns the Washington Post. Citing pre-print servers and unvetted "research repositories," they note that "Any online platform without robust and potentially expensive safeguards is equally vulnerable.""This is similar to the debate we're having with Facebook and Twitter. To what degree are we creating an instrument that speeds disinformation, and to what extent are you contributing to that?" said Stefano M. Bertozzi, editor in chief of the MIT Press online journal "Rapid Reviews: COVID-19...." Bertozzi added, "Most scientists have no interest in getting in a pissing match in cyberspace..." Nonscientists also scan preprint servers for data that might appear to bolster their pet conspiracy theories. A research team led by computer scientist Jeremy Blackburn has tracked the appearance of links to preprints from social media sites, such as 4chan, popular with conspiracy theorists. Blackburn and a graduate student, Satrio Yudhoatmojo, found more than 4,000 references on 4chan to papers on major preprint servers between 2016 and 2020, with the leading subjects being biology, infectious diseases and epidemiology. He said the uneven review process has "lent an air of credibility" to preprints that experts might quickly spot as flawed but ordinary people wouldn't. "That's where the risk is," said Blackburn, an assistant professor at Binghamton University. "Papers from the preprint servers show up in a variety of conspiracy theories...and are misinterpreted wildly because these people aren't scientists..." [The executive director of ASAPbio, a nonprofit group that pushes for more transparency and wider use of preprint servers], added, in general, "Preprint servers do not have the resources to be arbiters of whether something is true or not." MIT Press's new "Rapid Reviews: COVID-19" journal recently appended a scathing editor's note to its critique of articles that had been published on pre-print servers. "While pre-print servers offer a mechanism to disseminate world-changing scientific research at unprecedented speed, they are also a forum through which misleading information can instantaneously undermine the international scientific community's credibility, destabilize diplomatic relationships, and compromise global safety."

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