Yale School of Medicine's Harlan Krumholz has proposed the creation of a preprint server for clinical research, called MedArXiv, ScienceInsider reports. However, it adds that that plan, presented at a conference on peer review in Chicago, has had a "mixed reception."
Physicists have used the arXiv preprint server for years and the bioRxiv server for the life sciences has also become more commonly used. According to ScienceInsider, Krumholz argued that it's now medical research's turn and that such a server would speed up the pace of clinical research.
But others at the meeting worry that releasing clinical studies to the public without peer review could affect patient health. "It would be helpful to be sure we don't do harm," says Howard Bauchner, editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
JAMAevidence's Drummond Rennie, though, tells ScienceInsider that "[p]eople in general don't go straight from a paper to the prescription pad."
Additionally, ScienceInsider notes that how journals like JAMA treat papers that have been uploaded to a preprint server — whether they consider them already published or not — will also be important consideration for clinical researchers.