bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.01.21.427563; this version posted January 21, 2021. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY 4.0 International license. 1 Publication practices during the COVID-19 2 pandemic: Biomedical preprints and peer- 3 reviewed literature 4 5 Yulia V. Sevryugina1* and Andrew J. Dicks2 6 7 1 University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States of America 8 2 School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States of America 9 10 * Corresponding author 11 E-mail:
[email protected] (YS) 12 13 Abstract 14 The coronavirus pandemic introduced many changes to our society, and deeply affected 15 the established in biomedical sciences publication practices. In this article, we present a 16 comprehensive study of the changes in scholarly publication landscape for biomedical sciences 17 during the COVID-19 pandemic, with special emphasis on preprints posted on bioRxiv and 18 medRxiv servers. We observe the emergence of a new category of preprint authors working in the 19 fields of immunology, microbiology, infectious diseases, and epidemiology, who extensively used 20 preprint platforms during the pandemic for sharing their immediate findings. The majority of these 21 findings were works-in-progress unfitting for a prompt acceptance by refereed journals. The 22 COVID-19 preprints that became peer-reviewed journal articles were often submitted to journals 1 bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.01.21.427563; this version posted January 21, 2021.