COVID research is free to access — but for how long?

Abstract

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientific journals rushed to make related research free to read -temporarily, at least. Work on the disease or the virus SARS-CoV-2 would be free "at least for the duration of the outbreak", publishers announced on 31 January 2020, the day after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a 'public-health emergency of international concern', or PHEIC. Now the pandemic is in its third year, and reports are circulating that the end of freeto-access COVID-19 research is nigh.The alarm was sounded in August, when a prominent open-access advocate warned that COVID-related research was going back behind paywalls (see go.nature. com/3dc5at9). "This is both disappointing and worrying," wrote Robert Kiley, head of strategy at cOAlition S in Strasbourg, France, the group of funders that supports the open-access Plan S initiative. Kiley cited an analysis of the effects of the COVID-19 open-sharing commitment, commissioned and co-funded by the London-based charity Wellcome, the funding agency UK Research and Innovation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington. "Several [publishers] have already started re-introducing paywalls," said the paper, which was posted online in June before peer review (A. Chiarelli et al. Preprint at Zenodo https://doi.org/jjc4; 2022).The sentence had been included partly on the basis of "presumptions" by people interviewed in the study, and also because the authors noted that some publishers had shuttered online COVID-19 information portals, says Hannah Hope, the openresearch lead at Wellcome, which has spearheaded efforts to open up research in public-health emergencies. But it lacks direct evidence, she says. After being contacted by Nature, the authors issued a second version without the sentence.

Transparency in infectious disease research: a meta-research survey of specialty journals

“…Furthermore, the overall rate of open access status has increased with the COVID-19 pandemic and the funders’ and publishers’ open sharing commitments that came as a response to the pandemic. Prior estimates have shown upward of 97% of COVID-19 papers being open access publications(36–38), outpacing any other field’s openness and further skewing the sample.…”

The impact of COVID-19 on the debate on open science: An analysis of expert opinion

“…Documents in the corpus also emphasised the value of openness for social movements and civil society organisations (Chan et al, 2020;Shearer et al, 2020). Several authors simply advocated for all research being made available (Finley, 2020;Rooryck, 2020;Van Noorden, 2022;Willinsky, 2020), and not only in times of crisis (Kiley & Rooryck, 2022;Napolitano, 2020;Nelson, 2022;SNSF, 2020). It is significant that this kind of thinking seems to have underpinned policy making.…”