Sinai Immunology Review Project

We initiated an institutional effort to provide critical reviews of COVID-19 articles posted daily on the preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv1, which we call the Sinai Immunology Review Project. This effort was designed to meet two needs. The first is a desire from our students, postdocs, fellows and faculty members to contribute to the global research effort and harness their knowledge and skills to help the scientific community. The second stems from a challenging consequence of the growing importance of preprints in scientific communication. The swift and open dissemination of information offered by preprints has already proved crucial in providing rapid scientific responses to the emerging public threat of viral outbreaks. However, the ambition of preprint servers was never to replace the peer-review process. The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has been matched by an impressive rise in related publications in both preprint servers and peer-reviewed journals. At a time when journal editors and invited reviewers are more solicited than ever, we decided that it is the responsibility of the scientific community to help curate this unprecedented flow of scientific data. Reviewing preprints benefits both the authors and the scientific community and provides the general public with access to scientific discussion, helping to reinforce scientific credibility.