How Preprint Affects the Publishing Process: Duration of the Peer Review Process between bioRxiv and Journal Papers.

During the COVID‐19 epidemic, the characteristics of rapid sharing of research findings were fully reflected on the bioRxiv platform, which received considerable attention from scholars. bioRxiv currently collaborates with 242 journals, addressing that it can save authors time in submitting papers to journals or peer review services by transmitting their manuscript files and metadata directly from bioRxiv. To see if preprints are altering the publishing process, we compared the duration of the peer review process between bioRxiv and journal papers. This study investigated papers' submission and publication times from bioRxiv to journals (B2J) and authors to journals (A2J) in 119 academic journals from November 2013 to February 2020. Findings reveal that 33 journals exhibited significant differences in the duration time between B2J and A2J papers. B2J papers were published faster than A2J papers in 29 journals, indicating that sharing on the preprint platform could shorten the peer review time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]