STAT on Coronavirus
Two articles that are part of STAT's dropped-paywall coverage.
And Nature on February 9: "The Journal Nature Has Dropped Its Paywall for Coronavirus Reporting and Research".
Here are more, via The Scientist, February 13:
Journals Open Access to Coronavirus Resources
Nearly 100 academic journals, societies, institutes, and companies sign a commitment to make research and data on COVID-19 freely available, at least for the duration of the outbreak.
The World Health Organization announced that the novel coronavirus disease, now known as COVID-19, was a public health emergency of international concern on January 30. By then, 9,826 cases and 213 deaths had been confirmed. Yesterday, February 12, those numbers rose to 45,171 cases and 1,115 deaths.
Scientists and medical professionals around the globe have been relying on freely available studies, resources, and datasets to quickly inform treatment strategies, public health initiatives, and drug development.
Even before the outbreak was declared an international public health emergency, researchers in the US and elsewhere commended the speed with which scientists in China shared the first genome of the 2019-nCoV virus, recently dubbed SARS-CoV-2. The first reports of the disease came from Wuhan at the end of December, and by January 8, scientists in China sequenced the viral genome and made it public. “Progress with research on this virus has been amazingly rapid,” says Stanley Perlman, a microbiologist at the University of Iowa.
We’re getting up to 20 submissions per day on coronavirus.On January 31 this year, a day after the novel coronavirus was designated a public health emergency of global concern, 94 academic journals, societies, institutes, and companies signed a commitment to making research and data on the disease freely available, at least for the duration of the outbreak.
—Edward Campion, NEJM
“The responsible thing to do is to make all research freely available during epidemics or possibly pandemics where there are people at risk,” says Edward Campion, the executive editor of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), which signed on to the commitment. Papers on other diseases, “all of which are important,” he adds, remain behind a paywall. “It’s a balancing act. . . . Our expenses are paid mainly by subscribers.”
Other signatories, such as PLOS, are open-access all the time, charging fees to authors instead of readers. “PLOS is well-positioned to respond to any outbreak,” says Joerg Heber, the editor-in-chief of PLOS One. In addition to being open-access, the journal requires all data necessary to replicate the study to be published alongside it. Still, it takes time to peer-review studies, Heber adds, so PLOS “strongly encourages all researchers submitting coronavirus-related papers to us to post these as preprints so that they are available as soon as possible.”
While some paywalled journals have made studies free during previous outbreaks such as the 2009 flu pandemic, the WHO called for journals to develop special protocols for situations deemed to be global public health emergencies during the 2014–2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. In the Fall of 2015, the WHO met with stakeholders from the BMJ, the Nature journals, the NEJM, and the seven PLOS journals, who all agreed in a statement that journals should “encourage or mandate public sharing of relevant data,” and that sharing said data—even before publication—should not prevent journals from accepting and publishing those authors’ studies....MORE
