Rapid Reviews: COVID-19 is an open-access overlay journal that seeks to accelerate peer review of COVID-19-related research and prevent the dissemination of false or misleading scientific news. The editorial team identifies papers related to the novel coronavirus and its impacts that have been posted to preprint servers and commissions cross-linked, rapid peer reviews of these manuscripts. The journal also offers publishing options to the authors of papers that are positively reviewed, providing a vital outlet for research communications produced in the wake of the pandemic.
The editors approach COVID-19 and its wide-ranging effects from a multidisciplinary perspective, reviewing papers from a variety of fields including medicine; public health; the physical, biological, and chemical sciences; the social sciences; and the humanities. The editorial office is based at the University of California, Berkeley, with Professor Stefano Bertozzi serving as editor-in-chief.
The editors are committed to both disciplinary and geographic breadth and take care not only to source manuscripts from all regions but also to include board members and reviewers from all regions. To help scale their efforts, they are coalescing a network of student screeners from UC Berkeley and other universities around the world who will help them to conduct the initial scan of preprint servers and will leverage AI to identify important papers.
