Aguzzi, A.

Waeber, G.

Swiss Medical Weekly

English

Serveur académique lausannois

Viewpoint | Published 01 December 2023 | doi:https://doi.org/10.57187/s.3496Cite this as: Swiss Med Wkly. 2023;153:3496Launching SwissMedPreprints, the Swiss MedicalWeekly’s biomedical preprint serverAdriano Aguzzi, Gérard Waebera Institute Director, Institute of Neuropathology, University of Zurich, Switzerland / Editor in chief Swiss Medical Weeklyb Chairman of the Department of Medicine, Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV), Switzerland / Editor in chief Swiss Medical WeeklyThe purpose of scientific communication is to rapidly dis-seminate advances in knowledge among communities ofscientists and, beyond that, to the general public. For manydecades, this was primarily accomplished through publish-ing peer-reviewed manuscripts. Peer review is expectedto provide a certain level of validation: It confirms thatspecialised experts have scrutinised each published man-uscript’s methodology, results, and conclusions and foundthem to satisfy generally accepted quality criteria. Thissystem has served the biomedical community very wellover a long period.However, an increasing number of cracks are starting toappear beneath the surface of what continues to be a well-oiled machine. Firstly, peer review is anything but perfect.Peers are often conscientious and provide detailed, helpfulreviews. However, reviews can also be superficial, sufferfrom implicit bias, and be sometimes claimed to be abusedby unscrupulous peers (although experienced editors willcatch and correct such situations). Secondly, different jour-nals adopt different definitions of what they consider peerreview. Therefore, there is a spectrum of divergent qualitystandards, ranging from highly professional to sloppy tononexistent. This problem is exacerbated by the pay-for-play policy of most open-access journals (a policy thatSwiss Medical Weekly has always rejected), which linksthe publishers’ revenues to the number of published arti-cles regardless of their quality.While peer review undisputedly provides robust qualitycontrol of scientific communications despite its aforemen-tioned shortcomings, it suffers from decisive drawbacks.Peer review can take a long time, creating month-long(sometimes year-long) delays in science communication.Moreover, the burden on reviewers has increased im-mensely due to the sheer volume of scientific manuscriptsthat inundate journals worldwide. Consequently, it has be-come hard for editors to motivate expert reviewers willingto donate their time for what is essentially a philanthropic,altruistic activity. Swiss Medical Weekly provides a smallhonorarium to its peer reviewers, but it admittedly rep-resents a symbolic token rather than a proper compensa-tion. Therefore, many manuscripts submitted to biomed-ical journals can linger in limbo before authors can beprovided with competent, critical feedback.However, a profound revolution has occurred over the past several years, thanks mainly to the herculean efforts of Cold Spring Harbor’s Richard Sever with the support of the innovative and helpful Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The tangible result of their efforts is the establishment of two preprint servers: bioRxiv and medRxiv. Authors can sub-mit non-peer-reviewed versions of their manuscripts that will be published on the respective websites after a cursory sanity check. While the culture of publishing preprints had long been established in physics, it is a novelty in the bio-medical sciences, which has long followed a culture of se-crecy (often explicitly demanded by major journals around unpublished findings). However, these antiquated precepts are being increasingly regarded as obsolete, and preprints have become the primary means of scientific communica-tion by many leading laboratories.In this context, we at Swiss Medical Weekly are pleased to announce the launch of a preprint server aimed at fulfill-ing the needs of the biomedical community. Specifically, we welcome the publication of case reports and small case series. In this respect, the Swiss Medical Weekly addresses a gap not serviced by medRxiv, which consciously decid-ed (for understandable reasons) to abstain from publishing such manuscripts.Case reports are often said to represent the highest form of medical publishing. Indeed, the importance of reporting unusual syndromes, new diseases, or complications from therapy can hardly be overstated: the discovery of many emerging human diseases (including AIDS and COVID-19) is often heralded by the report of an index pa-tient or very small case series. However, because of the in-trinsic difficulties of extrapolating from a single case re-port to universally valid concepts, such reports often lack in-depth analyses of the patients being reported, such as new molecular technology or cutting-edge imaging. Con-sequently, case reports often remain anecdotal and lack the statistical basis and in-depth understanding of what has happened, which is needed to establish firm causal re-lationships. Because of these limitations, Swiss Medical Weekly rarely publishes case reports and only does so if they report new pathogenetic concepts or describe a novel aspect of a known disease.Professor Adriano AguzziInstitute of NeuropathologyUniversity Hospital ofZurichSchmelzbergstrasse 21CH-8091 Zürichadriano.aguzzi[at]usz.chProfessor Gérard WaeberChairman Department ofMedicineBH 10-628Centre hospitalier universi-taire vaudois (CHUV)CH-1011 Lausannegerard.waeber[at]chuv.chSwiss Medical Weekly · www.smw.ch · published under the copyright license Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Page 1 of 3But even those case reports that might be of limited novelty at first glance can ultimately be extremely useful when aggregated. For example, a frequent description of intoxication cases in a specific geographic area may point to a common source of poisoning. The increased frequency of prion diseases in young individuals in the late 1990s in the United Kingdom helped establish that bovine spongiform encephalopathy (“mad cow disease”) had indeed been transmitted to humans.Similarly, case reports and series often herald the detection of newly emerging infectious diseases such as HIV, SARS-CoV-1 and -2, Candida auris, the association of Heli-cobacter pylori with gastric ulcers, and so many more. Therefore, it is vital to maintain a shareable and findable database of such reports since they can become a trove of essential information for future meta-analyses. The preprint server we are launching aims to provide the solu-tion to the above.Naturally, it is important to highlight that preprints do not constitute established medical knowledge, and their con-tent has not been scrutinised by peers. In other words, the responsibility for the content of a preprint rests solely with its authors. The editorial team at Swiss Medical Weekly will do its best to prevent articles lacking a scientific foun-dation, or promoting ideological or commercial interests, from appearing on the server. Viewpoint Swiss Med Wkly. 2023;153:3496Swiss Medical Weekly · www.smw.ch · published under the copyright license Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Page 2 of 3As our first and foremost criterion, only manuscripts that report actual biomedical science will be accepted. You will never read manuscripts that extol homoeopathy or any other “magical” pseudoscience. Furthermore, we will take care to prevent the publication of preprints that do not adhere to established ethical standards or case reports that are insufficiently anonymised.Finally, SwissMedPreprints will not be limited to the publi-cation of case reports. Biomedical publications of any kind are welcome. However, all articles must first be submit-ted to the Swiss Medical Weekly. When articles suitable for publication in Swiss Medical Weekly are sent for exter-nal review, the authors will receive an offer to post them in parallel on SwissMedPreprints (figure 1). It will also be possible to publish articles on the preprint server even if they receive a desktop rejection for Swiss Medical Week-ly; they can then be submitted to another journal.SwissMedPreprints is a genuinely philanthropic endeav-our, in stark contrast to analogous ventures by several large commercial publishers whose primary purpose is to cap-ture authors into their ecosystem of pay-to-play journals.We hope this innovation will provide a valuable and much-needed service for the current generation of biomedical scientists in Switzerland and worldwide and future gen-erations of physicians who may harken back, maybe in decades, to what we publish today.Figure 1: Submission workflow Swiss Medical Weekly.Viewpoint Swiss Med Wkly. 2023;153:3496Swiss Medical Weekly · www.smw.ch · published under the copyright license Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Page 3 of 3

Launching SwissMedPreprints, the Swiss Medical Weekly's biomedical preprint server.

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Adriano Aguzzi

Gérard Waeber

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Launching SwissMedPreprints, the Swiss Medical Weekly’s biomedical preprint server

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Launching SwissMedPreprints, the Swiss Medical Weekly's biomedical preprint server.

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