[DiogenesKynikos]

How can you criticize The Lancet for a small number of faked studies that have gotten through, but then praise pre-print servers, which are rife with complete nonsense?

Pre-print servers are great for getting results out quickly, but the level of quality control is extremely low. Journals are slower, but have a higher level of quality control.

There is a trade-off between speed and quality control, and both pre-print servers and journals sit at useful points in that trade-off.

Given the pressure to get information that might help fight CoVID-19 out quickly, journals have probably shifted towards the "quick/low-quality" end of the spectrum in the past few months. They'll move back when things calm down.

[rscho]

Journals have been hype/politically-driven since as long as one can remember. And peer-review quality is a joke.

Preprints are not perfect, but I'd wager that anything free and truly open to review is better than what we have now.

[Gatsky]

Specifically I am praising pre-print servers in the current crisis, not in general. I don't propose they can replace journals wholesale in the near future.

The harm done by bad research in the Lancet is colossal because the results are widely read and disseminated, that is obvious isn't it? Pre-print servers are still quite obscure. Anyway, arxiv has been running for a long time with much success in certain fields, and hasn't been overwhelmed with nonsense, so your characterisation of pre-print servers is poorly calibrated and hyperbolic.

Also the Lancet charges money for its products, and can therefore expect to be held to greater account.

[DiogenesKynikos]

So the pre-print servers are better because not a lot of people read pre-prints?

> arxiv has been running for a long time with much success in certain fields, and hasn't been overwhelmed with nonsense, your characterisation of pre-print servers is poorly calibrated and hyperbolic

I just said that the level of quality control on pre-print servers is extremely low - which it is. They check for very little beyond blatant plagiarism and obvious junk (determined within minutes).

I didn't say that pre-print servers are useless. They're very useful, but it's undeniable that prestigious journals apply an additional filter, which is much more exacting.

If you were to pick a random study from a pre-print server, and a random study from the Lancet, which do you think is more likely to be reliable? Which do you think has undergone more thorough peer-review?

[Gatsky]

You don't seem to be reading my comments. I agree with you that pre-print servers are not useless, and that prestigious journals are also not useless. Pre-print servers obviously have a lot of questionable content, this is immediately obvious. As I said, they are not a replacement for peer-reviewed journals (except maybe in the early stages of a pandemic, which was my long departed original point). It is also true that good research gets published in prestigious journals. Lots of good research also doesn't get published in prestigious journals because the editor of the Lancet decides it isn't interesting enough, or they chose clueless or callous reviewers who kill the paper in peer-review, or they just accepted a paper with the opposite result last week or for many other arbitrary reasons unrelated to the quality of the research or utility to humanity.