Research Exceptionalism and Opportunism During the Coronavirus Pandemic

In the era of COVID19, research has been conducted at an extraordinary pace, eliminating the time from submission to publication to unprecedented levels. This is facilitated by preprint platforms and social media which can spread, reproduce and promote new knowledge with enormous speed. However, there are many concerns regarding the risk of potential deflection from the peer review process that some journals might have adopted, in order to manage the overwhelming wave of COVID19-related submissions. Another dimension of this problem, is the inequity and the publication hurdles that many non-COVID19 scientists might face, since review process of non-COVID19 papers is delayed and journal space is limited to serve the COVID19 literature. Besides the access to publishing, some scientists have redirected their scholarly activity towards coronavirus publications, either permanently or temporarily or even opportunistically. The latter might be attributed to the ease that COVID19 related articles are getting published and cited. This epidemiologic and potentially academic crisis might also be an opportunity for editors, journals and reviewers to create a new journalistic landscape where rapid, transparent and thorough review process can be offered to the authors based on the lessons learned from the current ongoing crisis.