Medical journals help doctors to learn about recent medical advances and the latest research.
This is why clinical trials are so important , and editors need to make sure that the studies are reliable , and can be trusted . The standard way of doing this was peer review system , where selected experts were asked to vet the methods of the study , and comment on the scientific plausibility of the findings .
This method , which has been the gold standard for decades, is plagued with problems. It consumes time, which means the publication of the newest path-breaking research gets delayed. Even worse, this usually means that only a handful of experts get to decide whether research can be trusted or not – and this is the reason it a generation to die out before scientific paradigms change.
It’s high time we discarded this obsolete system, and started using technology to make it better.
Publishing preprints allows us to do this, so we get the best of both worlds. All readers act like peer reviewers , and provide their comments, so that we can tap into the wisdom of the crowds !
This is the big advantage of open source publishing for medical journals – and the fact that are so many more people providing their opinion means it’s going to be so much more robust and reliable.
This is why post marketing surveillance is far better at identifying problems than clinical trials !