Community reviews on our neonatal outbreak preprint

Melody Parker preprinted her study on using long-read sequencing to study an ESBL outbreak in a neonatal ward in July 2026 and in early September we received a notification that it had undergone community review. My initial reaction was, well, of shock as I am not used to people reviewing our preprints! But having thought about it (and read the reviews in detail) it is a great idea as not only did it help us improve our manuscript but also these reviews are open and publicly available so I hope help other researchers assess the utility of our study.

The community reviews were organised by Rapid ReviewsDiseases which “is an open-access overlay journal that accelerates peer review of important infectious disease-related research preprints” and it seems can be traced back to the Covid-19 pandemic when they setup Rapid Reviews to “accelerate peer review of COVID-19-related research and prevent the dissemination of false or misleading scientific news”. During the Covid-19 pandemic I remember it was taking far longer just to get a preprint posted on medRxiv and lots of news stories were being based on preprints, which are of course not peer-reviewed so can be of variable quality.