With the Zika virus spreading north into the United States, Alessandro Vespignani of Northeastern University pulled together some important information he wanted to share.
Mr. Vespignani, a professor computer sciences, led a research team that created the first model of the global spread of Zika based on the travel patterns of individual people.
In the hands of policy makers such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the model could give health experts critical guidance on what to tell the public and where to deploy medical resources at a time of widespread anxiety and uncertainty.
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With the Zika virus spreading north into the United States, Alessandro Vespignani of Northeastern University pulled together some important information he wanted to share.
Mr. Vespignani, a professor computer sciences, led a research team that created the first model of the global spread of Zika based on the travel patterns of individual people.
In the hands of policy makers such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the model could give health experts critical guidance on what to tell the public and where to deploy medical resources at a time of widespread anxiety and uncertainty.
Mr. Vespignani and his team, however, faced their own anxiety and uncertainty. It typically takes months to shepherd a piece through the publication process of a major academic journal. The researchers were projecting an epidemic’s spread within days. What good options existed for sharing those projections?
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One method — posting the work online before seeking peer review — is fast. But it can jeopardize the chances that the work is taken seriously or allowed for publication by a peer-reviewed journal, which is a critical part of the academic reward structure. Publishing in a fast-paced journal was another option, but that too could prioritize speed at the possible cost of academic respect. The top-ranked journals increasingly offer their own faster publishing channels, but those are often reserved for just a select set of top-priority papers.
We’re not getting information to the scientific community in a timely manner.
In the end, Mr. Vespignani chose the first option. He posted his paper last month to bioRxiv, a free online distribution service run by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. “There are many more pros in posting the paper and giving the community the ability to look at all the results in real time,” he explained.
But the dilemma still unsettles him and many other researchers working on fast-moving public-health threats. In the past decade or so, experiences with outbreaks that include SARS, H1N1, and Ebola have greatly improved the mechanisms and strategies that journals and scientists use to quickly share vital information. But in the eyes of many researchers who study epidemics, the solutions remain scattered and incomplete.
“We’re not getting information to the scientific community in a timely manner,” said Peter Jay Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine and founding editor-in-chief of PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. “And as a result, for things like Zika, we’re relying on this informal system of journalists from major newspapers, emails from colleagues, picking up the phone and talking to thought leaders, and it creates misinformation.”
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Finding solutions is complicated because the tradeoffs are complicated. In 2009 Kamran Khan, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, faced a situation similar to that encountered by Mr. Vespignani. Dr. Khan and some colleagues analyzed the flight itineraries for passengers leaving Mexico to try to predict the global spread of H1N1, both to help manage public concerns and help medical professionals prepare.
A leading medical journal, which he asked not be named, printed their findings. But even with an expedited process it took more than a month, greatly reducing the ultimate value of the published information, Dr. Khan said. His research team had to consider not only the expected time of publication, but the need to pare down their report to help speed the process, he said.
‘Fast’ vs. ‘Easy’
Years later, Dr. Khan said, systems have improved. But they still leave researchers with perishable information struggling to figure out their best options. “It consumes a lot of energy and a significant amount of time thinking through some of this,” he said, “just because we’re trying to navigate a process that is inherently slower than the pace of many of these emergencies.”
Pioneering efforts include arXiv.org and bioRxiv.org (pronounced “archive” and “bio-archive”), where researchers can freely post findings. But the lack of peer review on such sites can leave readers uncertain about quality while exposing researchers to the prospect — albeit now dwindling — that major peer-reviewed journals will reject the work as no longer novel.
Journals in the PLOS Currents series are specifically designed to handle reviews quickly, though they do not maintain the strong reputation of a top medical journal. Meanwhile, the more widely acknowledged top journals, including Science and Nature, have created their own fast-track processes for selected articles.
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“Fast” at such top journals can mean as little as 48 hours to online publication, said Lone Simonsen, a research professor in the Department of Global Health at George Washington University and an editor at PLOS Currents Outbreaks. For that kind of treatment, however, “you have to have something that’s spectacular,” she said.
Quicker also doesn’t mean “easier” peer review, said Steven J. Cooke, a professor of environmental science and biology at Carleton University who has studied journals’ efforts to speed their publication processes. Instead, editors seeking outside reviewers work even more aggressively to find them, sending multiple emails and following them with phone calls, or using their own editorial teams, Mr. Cooke said.
“There are ways to move really key pieces forward with more speed, while maintaining the same rigor,” he said.
That attitude has become an every-day priority at the Journal of Infectious Diseases, said one of its associate editors, William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University. The editor in chief, Martin S. Hirsch, regularly grades the associate editors on how quickly they move manuscripts through the review process, Dr. Schaffner said.
In many cases, Mr. Schaffner said, the journals move so fast that the limiting factor is the speed with which the authors can respond to reviewer questions. But there are limits to increasing both speed and volume, Dr. Hotez said. After all, peer reviewers are fellow researchers who are already being asked to take time to read and assess papers without compensation.
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Many journals also have revised policies that ban the consideration of manuscripts that have already appeared on publicly available sites such as arXiv.org and bioRxiv.org. The World Health Organization helped push that change by creating its own online space for such manuscripts, called Zika Open, and asking leading journals not to treat such submissions as ineligible for publication.
‘Habits of Academia’
Sites like bioRxiv can complicate life for public-health officials as much as it helps them, Mr. Cooke said. In some cases, he said, the quick release of working papers could create public pressure for a response that policy makers might not yet see as justified.
Mr. Vespignani discussed his findings separately with experts from the CDC and other agencies to get feedback and help them understand his work. Such agencies typically have their own ways to evaluate science, Mr. Cooke said, with an eye on potential applications that a journal peer-review process might not include.
The paper from Mr. Vespignani’s group is a good example of the challenges confronting researchers and journals facing public-health emergencies, said Stephen S. Morse, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University. The work appears to be valuable, Mr. Morse said, yet it’s not a simple matter to assess whether it could or should have waited for peer-review treatment.
Among the questions the Vespignani team has helped highlight, Mr. Morse said, is whether researchers and universities are placing appropriate emphasis on journal publication as a measurement of career success. Mr. Vespignani, for his part, feels journals need to work harder to balance oversight with timeliness. “We should get out of the habits of academia,” in which peer review has become too much of a struggle for perfection, he said.
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For Dr. Hotez, a chief concern is accuracy. He said he’s troubled by repeated references in the media to the idea that some 80 percent of people with Zika are asymptomatic, because there’s little scientific basis for such an estimate, and because people on the ground in South America warn him against believing that. Giving more researchers better options to report their findings quickly might help counter such misimpressions, Dr. Hotez said.
Either way, he said, the struggle of the scientific community to respond to Zika is “yet another wake-up call that business as usual is not adequately keeping the scientific community informed.”
Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He can be found on Twitter @pbasken, or reached by email at paul.basken@chronicle.com.
Paul Basken was a government policy and science reporter with The Chronicle of Higher Education, where he won an annual National Press Club award for exclusives.