GoKawiilA level of peer review can happen for manuscripts submitted to preprint servers.Credit: Wasan Tita/iStock via Getty
The COVID‑19 pandemic had a major effect on scholarly communication, accelerating data sharing, peer review and the publication of preprints. Although preprints have been around for decades, the pandemic underscored the part they play in the rapid, free and open dissemination of scientific knowledge.
The proliferation of artificial-intelligence-generated manuscripts and junk science in the past few years has forced preprints to adapt once again. Some repositories seem to be tightening their quality-control and moderation procedures in an effort to protect against these threats.
Preprint moderators have to strike “a really, really difficult balance” between rapidly sharing new research and protecting the community from flawed or harmful material, says Natascha Chtena, who studies scholarly communication and open science at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.
Chtena and Alice Fleerackers, a social scientist at the University of Amsterdam, have been looking into moderation practices at preprint servers. They’ve found that, under specific circumstances, moderators make judgements about the quality of submissions, often using criteria similar to those applied by academic journals.
Although these efforts are well intentioned, legitimate submissions can get caught in the crossfire, says Fleerackers.
Fleerackers, who has been researching the preprint ecosystem for six years, has experienced this herself. In 2025, she submitted a qualitative study on science journalism to a major repository, only to be told that it contained no new data or analysis. It was her second rejection by that repository that year – a stark change from previous years, when she’d had several submissions accepted by the repository in similar research areas.
Making it more difficult for genuine research to be published ins preprints “fundamentally goes against the spirit of open science and the commitment to advancing inclusive, rapid knowledge sharing that is at the heart of preprints’ value — for both science and society”, Fleerackers says.
This raises the question: how much moderation by a repository is too much?
No one-size-fits-all approach
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