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Abstract

It is all but a trivial endeavor to edit a journal issue in the midst of turmoil such as the one created by the incessant COVID-19 crisis -all the more if the journal is new and still growing. Like other periodicals, we were tempted to dedicate an entire issue to the topic, postponing already accepted non-COVID-19 papers to a later date. Yet, after careful deliberation, we decided against pursuing a whole special issue on COVID-19 and instead chose to include a special topic within a regular one. This is why:The measures taken to contain SARS-CoV-2 -including large-scale lockdowns -have affected the lives of millions of people worldwide and have disrupted social and economic development as well as scientific enterprise (Myers et al., 2020). Since the proclamation of the pandemic by the WHO in March 2020, COVID-19 research activities have experienced an unparalleled rise, reflected not only in the vast increase of corresponding publications (Abbas & Pittet, 2020), but also in the extraordinary number of trials related to SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 which were registered on ClinicalTrials.gov (Estrada, 2020). In a similar vein, the scientific landscape witnessed an increase in provision of open access articles, expedited ethical approvals, expanded third party-funding, and an upsurge of pre-print papers (Glasziou, Sanders, & Hoffmann, 2020). While the context of crisis may produce a number of advantages (e.g., improved access to papers, reduction of bureaucratic hurdles), the recent developments seem to have led to an exacerbation of already existing pitfalls in the scientific system. Generally, these may be characterized by two phenomena, which -not just at this point in time -may be regarded as problematic for science: speed and exclusivity.Rushing to publish studies deemed critical is not a novel phenomenon. Records reaching back to the Spanish flu at the beginning of the 20 th century describe the pressure to test treatments, resulting in an abundance of poorly conducted studies and excessive media coverage of doubtful cures (Estrada, 2020). The renowned problem of methodologically poor studies -with estimates going up as high as 85% (Glasziou, Sanders, & Hoffmann, 2020) -has only been aggravated by the current COVID-19 crisis and is mirrored in a paucity of randomized-control-tri-