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The MIT Press has announced the launch of Rapid Reviews: COVID-19 (RR:C19), an open access, rapid-review overlay journal that will accelerate peer review of COVID-19-related research and deliver real-time, verified scientific information that policymakers and health leaders can use.

Scientists and researchers are working overtime to understand the SARS-CoV-2 virus and are producing an unprecedented amount of preprint scholarship that is publicly available online but has not been vetted yet by peer review for accuracy. Traditional peer review can take four or more weeks to complete, but RR:C19’s editorial team, led by editor-in-chief, Stefano M. Bertozzi, Professor of Health Policy and Management and Dean Emeritus of the School of Public Health at University of California Berkeley, will produce expert reviews in a matter of days.

Using artificial intelligence tools, a global team will identify promising scholarship in preprint repositories, commission expert peer reviews, and publish the results on an open access platform in a completely transparent process. The journal will strive for disciplinary and geographic breadth, sourcing manuscripts from all regions and across a wide variety of fields, including medicine; public health; the physical, biological, and chemical sciences; the social sciences; and the humanities. RR:C19 will also provide a new publishing option for revised papers that are positively reviewed.

Made possible by a $350,000 grant from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation and hosted on PubPub, an open-source publishing platform from the Knowledge Futures Group for collaboratively editing and publishing journals, monographs, and other open access scholarly content, RR:C19 will limit the spread of misinformation about COVID-19.

The editorial board for RR:C19 currently includes Paulin Basinga, Gates Foundation; Nancy Birdsall, Center for Global Development; Jeanine Condo, National University of Rwanda; Robert Gallo, University of Maryland; Dean Jamison, University of Washington; Jerome Kim, International Vaccine Institute; Santiago Levy, The Brookings Institution; Fenyong Liu, UC Berkeley; Felix Masiye, University of Zambia, University of Washington; Jonna Mazet, UC Davis; Shankar Sastry, UC Berkeley; and Mauro Schechter, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, University of Pittsburgh, Johns Hopkins University. RR:C19 will publish its first reviews in July 2020 and is actively recruiting potential reviewers and contributors.

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