Facing an urgent demand for access to the latest coronavirus research, scientists are speeding up the process of publicizing their findings, at the risk of enabling the spread of scientific misinformation.

In recent months, researchers studying the virus have increasingly opted to post their papers as soon as they are written, ahead of peer review and journal publication, to online repositories of academic articles known as “preprint servers.”

In one notorious instance, one study by a group of scientists at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in January fueled conspiracy theories that claimed the virus is a laboratory-manufactured bioweapon. The paper purported to identify an “uncanny similarity” between the new coronavirus and HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. 

Derek Lowe, author of Science magazine’s In the Pipeline blog on drug discovery, told me via email that, upon scrutiny, the paper “very quickly was found to be not able to justify its conclusions.”