The global scale of the current pandemic has led to what feels like a remarkably unprecedented level of solidarity in a world pulling together (while standing apart) amid this common cause of fighting the spread of Covid-19. In the area in which I work (from home) of scholarly communication, publishers have been not only creating public access to Covid-19 collections of research and professional resources, from Elsevier’s COVID-19 Clinical Toolkit to Wiley’s Coronavirus Resources & News. Wellcome Trust has reaffirmed its 2016 “Statement on Data Sharing in Public Health Emergencies,” which has been signed by every major biomedical publisher and research funder. It asserts that those who signed are committed “to work together to help ensure” in such situations that “all peer-reviewed research publications relevant to the outbreak are made immediately open access, or freely available at least for the duration of the outbreak,” and that “research findings are made available via preprint servers,” that is prior to the peer-review and publication process, adding greatly to the immediacy of the openness, as well as the clarity about the work still requiring further scrutiny before being accepted as established studies.
Read the full article on Slaw, Canada’s online legal magazine. Originally posted May 15, 2020.