Open Research in the Time of Coronavirus.
By: Georgia Melodie Hole
Tags: Research, Science, Data, Academia, Covid 19

COVID-19 and the rise of rapid dissemination of research.

Photo by Leyre Labarga on Unsplash

Covid-19 has changed the dissemination of science, with scientists favouring speed when it comes to publishing their findings on public health research, to share findings and data quickly during the crisis to combat the virus.

A clear example of this drive towards open and sharable research was a recent request from science leaders to the publishing community to make their content open and re-usable, sent on behalf of the chief science advisor or equivalent representing 12 countries. Over 40 journals and publishers also signed the statement “Sharing research data and findings relevant to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak”, agreeing to make their content accessible and reusable. These journals and publishers also committed to the immediate accessibility of COVID-19 and coronavirus-related publications and the available data supporting them, in PubMed Central (PMC), licensed in ways that facilitate reuse.

Open research ensures that research findings and data relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic are shared rapidly and openly to inform the public health response and help save lives; including enabling the World Health Organization (WHO) rapid access to emerging findings that could aid the global response. However, this growing ethos will hopefully grow beyond the epidemiology and virology associated most with COVID-19 research, improving access to the outcomes of research to benefit science as a whole.

Writing in Elephant in the Lab, Dr. Evgeny Bobrov, from the Open Data and Research Data Management Officer at QUEST Center, Berlin Institute of Health (BIH), believes that Open Research will strengthen due to the demands and pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic, but will still require a comprehensive approach to impact data sharing beyond the immediate disciplinary reach of COVID-19. Dr Bobrov states that “It is easy and sometimes maybe even tempting to draw a line between research fields where data can reasonably be expected to be used for immediate improvements to health and environment, and those where such use is much more distant and abstract.”

There are also of course human obstacles to data sharing, such as the perception of data standardisation and sharing being perceived as time-consuming and auxiliary to research shared through the traditional format of published journal articles. Sufficient reward may be needed for changing this behaviour and belief, which may take time to achieve. Dr Bobrov also highlights that “the perceived transactional cost of data curation and sharing will be augmented by a corona rebound effect, in which work will have piled up, and once researchers can return to normality, pressure will be higher than ever.” This highlights the need for publishing models which can ease and support the rapid dissemination of research and enable these improved methods of knowledge sharing.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted, open research and data is the future for a research landscape with transparency, robustness and reproducibility. of research.