History and Background

In 2019, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rapid Reviews\COVID-19 (RR:C19) was conceived by principals at the MIT Press and the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, launched with generous support from the McGovern Foundation. It became the first open-access overlay journal to accelerate formal peer review of COVID-19-related research preprints — preventing the spread of false or misleading scientific information while accelerating the validation and diffusion of robust, impactful findings.

Rapid Reviews\Infectious Diseases (RR\ID), launched in late 2022, builds on that proof of concept and expands beyond COVID-19 to advance the scientific community's understanding of infectious diseases and emerging outbreaks. The Rapid Reviews model is powered by an editorial office at UC Berkeley — staffed by undergraduate and graduate students — with project and technology management from the MIT Press and its partner, the Knowledge Futures Group.

This site is the UC Berkeley webapp portal supporting the RR\ID editorial workflow. The main journal — published reviews, editorial policies, and submissions — lives at rrid.mitpress.mit.edu.