Online scientific sites have been growing for more than a decade, becoming a vital part of the ecosystem for making and vetting claims across numerous academic fields, but their growth has been supercharged by the urgency of disseminating new discoveries about a deadly pandemic.
Some of the best-known of these sites, such as medRxiv and bioRxiv, have systems for rapid evaluation intended to avoid publishing work that doesn’t pass an initial sniff test of scientific credibility. They also reject papers that only review the work of others or that make such major claims that they shouldn’t be publicized before peer review can be conducted, said Richard Sever, co-founder of medRxiv and bioRxiv.https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/12/china-covid-misinformation-li-meng-yan/