Webinar Report: Preprinting in medicine

In this webinar our speakers discussed their experiences of publishing clinical and health research as preprints.

In our May 2021 #ECRWednesday webinar we reviewed how the need for rapid dissemination of meaningful clinical data in the ongoing fight with the COVID-19 pandemic encouraged the community to self-organise around biomedical preprints. Preprint repositories experienced an unprecedented spike of activity, and a number of consortia were set up to help rapidly review those urgently sought-after results, ranging from virus sequences to patient outcomes.

In this #ECRWednesday webinar Hedyeh Ebrahimi alongside our three panelists discussed the scale and pace of sharing results and how access to the latest medical and health research increases collaboration, accelerates discovery and saves lives. They considered how medical researchers, particularly those at early stages of their careers, have questions on how to leverage this medium, and what unintended consequences for their careers might be.

Our panelists spoke about the process of preprinting clinical and health research in relation to sharing results in medicine and the career implications for releasing your work early.

Chair:

Hedyeh Ebrahimi, member of the ECAG and Postdoctoral Researcher at Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Iran. She is studying epidemiological transitions and trends of non-communicable diseases at global and national levels.

Panellists:

Joseph Ross, MD, MHS, is a Professor of Medicine (General Medicine) and of Public Health (Health Policy and Management) at the Yale School of Medicine, an Associate Physician of the Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation at Yale-New Haven Health System, and Co-Director of the National Clinician Scholars Program at Yale.

Philippa Matthews is a consultant in clinical infection and an associate professor based at the University of Oxford (UK). She leads research into hepatitis b virus infection through international collaborations, particularly with clinical research teams in South Africa.

Dr. Jeremy Samuel Faust MD MS, is a proud emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in the division of health policy and public health, and an instructor at Harvard Medical School. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Scientific American, and appears frequently in Slate.

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Interested in our full selection of #ECRWednesday webinars, on topics such as preprints, finding funding and more? Take a look at the collection of past reports and recordings.