the problem with publicising scientific articles without peer review

The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed medical and data scientists into placing their results and their interpretations out into the public as pre-prints; many of which are not reviewed by their peers and may be premature. I find such practice very disturbing because many of these studies have been done hurriedly and are immature. 

As a scientist who has been tapped by technical journals to review articles in food science and rice genetics, and rice grain quality (plus the occasional request from Val to pore over thousands of rice science articles to help him find and summarise impact assessment studies... which I do using natural language processing), I have seen my fair share of papers which shouldn't see the light of day because the authors did not demonstrate that the methodologies they applied or their interpretations of their results are solid.

It's almost like receiving your undergraduate degree or your graduate degree without having your research manuscript, thesis, or dissertation undergo an assessment from experts either through an internal review and public defence in uni (which was what I did to complete my BSc degree in Biology from the University of the Philippines Los Baños) or an external review by a panel of experts from three different institutes (which was what my thesis underwent before I received my PhD degree from the University of Queensland).

Anyway, back to the scientists racing to publish their work on COVID-19... 

I know that many of these medical scientists just want their results out in the open to help people make decisions regarding patient care, flattening the epidemic curve, and kickstarting the global economy so that people don't go hungry. However, without the peer review process, many of the logical gaps these scientists present don't get caught and fixed. This leads to misinformation and/or misinterpretation by policymakers, government officials, and journalists. It has even led to at least one death because a tv viewer mistook an aquarium cleaner for the same medicine being touted as a cure for the disease.

Do I really need to mention the biggest bumbling example who keeps showing up on the telly these days, whose speeches are solid (a testament at how good the writers are) but keep breaking down into illogical pieces upon being picked for information during the Q&A portion? This person is a perfect example of a scientific "cherry-picker", promoting possible therapies forcibly (on-script) then backing off with the line "I am not a medical expert" (off-script). 

But I've digressed (again)...

On social media, I've seen data scientists who love to crunch the COVID-19 numbers, find trends, and present their interpretations to their wider audience as "scientific" blogs; totally eschewing the peer review process. This, I think, is even more disturbing because there is absolutely no filter. For pre-prints, scientists who glean over the articles can point out mistakes and the authors can withdraw their paper or improve it for eventual publication in journals and to inform policy dialogue. But the data scientists probably don't realise that they don't have the essential technical background to create a medically sound story about the epidemic, particularly if they haven't teamed up with epidemiologist/s. It's like being an armchair expert and claiming that your work is solid. The most responsible thing that these data scientists can do is to NOT publicise their work!