The future of scholarly communications

Abstract

As the rush intensifies to find ways to treat and manage COVID-19, one thing is clear: researchers, along with their counterparts in industry and the health services, need unrestricted access to the research literature. However, after more than 15 years of Open Access (OA) mandates, declarations, and discussions, some 75% of the world’s research literature is, on publication, only available to paying subscribers.1 Not only is this lack of access morally unacceptable — as much of this research is funded by the public purse — but it also has serious and damaging consequences. A letter in The New York Times ,2 and signed by the Chief Medical Officer in Liberia, stated that the Ebola epidemic could have been prevented had earlier research been made OA, while a study in Nature Biotechnology reported that a pharmaceutical company suffered a 6-month setback to a drug development programme because a paper was missed in an inaccessible journal.3 Aware of such concerns, and following a global call from science advisors, more than 50 publishers agreed to make all their COVID-19-related content freely available and accessible through PubMed Central (PMC) and Europe PMC. To date, more than 60 000 research articles have been made available through this initiative,4,5 which complements the OA research already published. Crucially, this content is licensed in ways that support text and data mining and machine learning technologies, allowing researchers and machines to search for and discover new and unexpected connections. One group of scientists have developed a digital coronavirus ‘knowledgebase’ (https://corona.cansar.icr.ac.uk), which uses AI technology to organise large amounts of COVID-19 data as it becomes available. Perhaps even more significant than making the COVID-19-related …

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