This is a science podcast for January 10th, 2025.

I'm Sarah Crespi.

First up this week, as preprint publications ramped up at the beginning of the COVID pandemic,

so did media attention for these pre-peer-reviewed results.

But what do the readers of news reports based on preprints know about them?

Jeff Brainer, an associate news editor here at Science,

joins me to discuss the public perception of preprints in the news and how to inject skepticism into stories about them.

Next, placing tiny tags on bats to follow them across Central Europe.

Former science intern and now researcher, Edward Hermey, revisits the podcast after 13 years away.

He discusses the difficulty of tracking bats as they fly long distances at night,

and what new tagging technology is revealing about their migration patterns.

So today we're going to talk about the public perception of preprints, how they're covered by news outlets,

and how they're treated the same or different to peer-reviewed research by the public.

Associate News Editor Jeff Brainerd is here. He runs our News in-briefed research by the public. Associate News Editor Jeff Braynard is here.

He runs our news and brief section and covers the ins and out of scholarly publishing.

Hi, Jeff.

Welcome to the science podcast.

Yeah, I, Sarah.

Thanks for having me on today.

Oh, sure.

To my mind, posting preprints, you know, finished manuscripts that have yet to be peer review. They haven't got undergone peer review. That's kind of been the norm in the physics world for a long time. I went

and looked this up. The archive preprint server is for physics, has was started in 1991. So this is a

...