What They Are Saying| Publishers Answer Call to Make COVID-19-Related Research Available to Everyone
Among the Cascade of Releasing COVID-19-related research are Elsevier, Springer Nature, PLOS, and American Chemistry Society
Dr. Kelvin Droegemeier, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and Member of President Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force, and government science leaders including science ministers and chief science advisors from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Singapore, and the United Kingdom call for publishers to make all COVID-19-related research and data immediately available to the public. After the letter was released, major publications opened information to everyone.
Here's what the scholarly publishing community is saying in support of the letter:
SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING COMMUNITY
ELSEVIER, Kumsal Bayazit, Chief Executive Officer: “The fight against the COVID-19 pandemic requires a global effort and Elsevier has been working together with the research and health community. At the start of the year we established a free COVID-19 Information Center that is updated daily with the latest research and includes links to more than 19,500 articles from across our journals including Cell and The Lancet. In working with the White House to improve the discoverability and utility of this important body of knowledge, we are now making it available to PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories such as the WHO COVID database for full text and data mining and without any limitations for as long as needed while the public health emergency is ongoing. Through this partnership we hope to help researchers to keep up with the rapidly growing body of literature and identify trends as countries around the world address this global health crisis.”
SPRINGER NATURE, Steven Inchcoombe, Chief Publishing Officer: “Springer Nature continues to look for ways to help fight the COVID-19 virus. We have made available for free all relevant research we have published and continue to publish, are strongly urging our authors submitting articles related to this emergency to share underlying datasets relating to the outbreak as rapidly and widely as possible, and are a signatory on the consensus statement, Sharing research data and findings relevant to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. We also have a role to play providing good, fact-based journalistic and opinion content on this fast-moving public health issues in Nature (for researchers and research leaders) and Scientific American (for the broader public). But we appreciate that more can be done which is why we fully support this initiative from the U.S. and other countries to see relevant research from all publishers available in one place and for this information is to be available in formats to allow for full text and data mining, with the relevant rights in place for re-use and secondary analysis. We are setting in place processes for this to happen and are confident that our authors will not only be supportive but expect us to take such action in times of crisis.”
PLOS, Veronique Kiermer, Chief Scientific Officer: “Open Access and Open Science are critical, especially in times of crisis. PLOS already supports, and calls on others to support, research being shared such that it can be centrally text- and data-mined, and also versioned in places where it will be most conveniently discovered by those tackling this crisis in real time.”
AMERICAN CHEMISTRY SOCIETY, Tom Connelly, Chief Executive Officer: “The American Chemical Society is committed to the global effort to halt the spread and threat of the COVID-19 pandemic. We applaud OSTP and its global partners in aggregating all COVID-19 and related research into PubMed. ACS is contributing all such research from across our 60 plus peer-reviewed journals toward this critical effort.”
WILEY RESEARCH, Judy Verses, Executive Vice President: “As the COVID-19 crisis continues, Wiley and its society partners are devoted to doing all we can to aid in the global response by delivering relevant research to scientists and practitioners on the front lines. A whole-of-system effort is critical, and we pledge to continue to join forces with the global community to advance research and support patient care. We are depositing any COVID-19 related research we publish into PubMed Central and licensing it to maximize discoverability and usability. To date, we have already enabled access to over 5,000 articles and have launched an AI-driven real-time feed aggregating the latest research and news on COVID-19.”
STM, Ian Moss, Chief Executive Officer: “STM is, as we all are, gravely concerned about the significant threat that COVID-19 represents to public health. To aid the efforts to slow the spread of the virus and, fundamentally, to save lives the publishing industry is working collectively to ensure that research findings are shared quickly to advance cutting-edge research. As a community, we hope that the provision of immediate access will aid the global response and make a difference.”
IOP PUBLISHING, Antonia Seymour, Publishing Director: “IOP Publishing is pleased to efforts to facilitate free access to materials related to the outbreak of Coronavirus (Covid-19) that can assist researchers, medical professionals, policy makers and others who are working to address this public health emergency. Any relevant published or forthcoming articles will be made immediately available to PMC throughout the duration of the crisis, with rights to enable text and data mining, re-use and secondary analysis.”
EMERALD GROUP, Laura Wilson, Head of Rights: “Having previously made all relevant Coronavirus and pandemic-related resources freely available, Emerald Publishing is committed to providing these and new publications/supporting data to the appropriate public repositories, in support of the global research effort against COVID-19.”
ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN PUBLISHERS, Maria Pallante, President and CEO: “The Association of American Publishers applauds the Administration’s leadership in convening researchers, funders, and publishers in the global emergency to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Publishers purposefully and continuously contribute to the advancement of science and medicine by investing billions of dollars in producing and disseminating high-quality, peer-reviewed journal articles. In this urgent and serious environment, we are grateful to the many publishers who are doing their part to communicate valuable discoveries, analyses, and data as quickly as possible, including by making their copyrighted articles pertaining to the virus freely available for public use during this crisis, in both text and machine-readable formats.”
F1000RESEARCH, Michael Markie, Publishing Director: “It’s critical that all research findings for the COVID-19 pandemic are open access and freely available. Immediate access to robust and rigorous science is essential for informing clinical and public health responses in real time. F1000Research strongly supports the sharing of research in a human and machine-readable format so that others can easily reuse, learn and further support the global efforts to tackle this pressing public health emergency. As a community, it is our duty to prioritize open and speedy dissemination of research to enable others to build upon new findings right away, wherever and whoever they are.”
ELIFE, Mike Eisen, Editor-in-Chief: "eLife applauds the leadership taken by the US and other countries to push science and medical journals to immediately share new COVID-19 research. As an open access publisher, we already make everything we publish freely available without delay because doing so accelerates research and brings better treatments for diseases to the public faster. In the midst of a public health crisis, the need for speed in science has never been more urgent, and we urge all publishers to commit to these principles."
For more information about the Coronavirus, please visit: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html.
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