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title: "The UK's department for health and preprints"
layout: post
image: 
    feature: header_health.png
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The other day I wrote about the response that we had from the UK's Department of Health and Social Care. [In that reply](https://eve.gd/2022/10/10/the-politics-of-peer-review-and-preprints-in-the-real-world/) the DHSC said that it had a problem with some of the evidence we had put forward because "it should also be noted that most of these studies are pre-prints (therefore have not been scrutinised through peer review)".

A few further notes on this. First, the entire vaccination programme and pandemic therapeutics response was based on preprints. Peer review and publication can take months. In a rapidly evolving pandemic situation, you must be reactive and adaptive. Preprints accelerate science and lack of peer review is not, on its own, a justification for ignoring them -- particularly when they come from labs with good track records of integrity and solid research.

Second, an organisation called [Overton](overton.io) got in touch with me. I hadn't heard of them before, but they are founded and run by Euan Adie, who setup Altmetric. As described on their site:

> Overton is the world’s largest searchable index of policy documents, guidelines, think tank publications and working papers. 
> It collects data from 182 countries and over a thousand sources worldwide with more being added all the time.
> We parse each document, finding references, people and key concepts, and then link them to the relevant news stories, academic research, think tank output and other policy.
> Our products allow you to search these documents and see where your ideas, papers, reports and staff are being cited or mentioned."

So it's basically an impact case study dream tool for those who work under the UK's REF!

What Overton very kindly told me -- with the also very generous offer of a free account -- was that there is plenty of evidence of UK governmental organisations citing material from medRxiv. These include:

* Food Standards Agency
* National Audit Office
* NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups
* NHS Scotland
* NICE
* Northern Ireland Assembly Research and Information Service
* Northern Ireland Executive
* Office for National Statistics
* Scottish Parliament Research Briefings
* The Scottish Government
* The UK Government
* The Welsh Government
* UK Parliament Research Briefings
* UK Parliament Select Committee Publications

So, again, I say, once more: the DHSC's protestations about the preprint nature of these documents is a political discursive/rhetorical move, not an actual reason for discrediting the research. It is another example of the complex interplay of power, politics, and science that has dogged the pandemic response worldwide.