Open Access of COVID-19-related publications in the first quarter of 2020: a preliminary study based in PubMed

Abstract

Background: The COVID-19 outbreak has made funders, researchers and publishers agree to have research publications, as well as other research outputs, such as data, become openly available. In this extraordinary research context of the SARS CoV-2 pandemic, publishers are announcing that their coronavirus-related articles will be made immediately accessible in appropriate open repositories, like PubMed Central (PMC), agreeing upon funders’ and researchers’ instigation. Methods: This work uses Unpaywall, OpenRefine and PubMed to analyse the level of openness of the papers about COVID-19, published during the first quarter of 2020. It also analyses Open Access (OA) articles published about previous coronavirus (SARS CoV-1 and MERS CoV) as a means of comparison. Results: A total of 5,611 COVID-19-related articles were analysed from PubMed. This is a much higher amount for a period of 4 months compared to those found for SARS CoV-1 and MERS during the first year of their first outbreaks (337 and 125 articles, respectively). Regarding the levels of openness, 97.4% of the SARS CoV-2 papers are freely available; similar rates were found for the other coronaviruses. Deeper analysis showed that (i) 68.3% of articles belong to an undefined Bronze category; (ii) 72.1% of all OA papers don’t carry a specific license and in all cases where there is, half of them do not meet Open Access standards; (iii) there is a large proportion that present a copy in a repository, in most cases in PMC, where this trend is also observed. These patterns were found to be repeated in most frequent publishers: Elsevier, Springer and Wiley. Conclusions: Our results suggest that, although scientific production is much higher than during previous epidemics and is open, there is a caveat to this opening, characterized by the absence of fundamental elements and values ​​on which Open Science is based, such as licensing.

A Quantitative Modeling and Simulation Framework to Support Candidate and Dose Selection of Anti‐SARS‐CoV‐2 Monoclonal Antibodies to Advance Bamlanivimab Into a First‐in‐Human Clinical Trial

“…At the beginning of the pandemic in the United States, there was a paucity of data to develop the necessary PK and PD models due to tight timelines and a shortage of animal models. An extensive literature search, made possible by the open‐access practice 13 (including submissions to preprint servers and open‐access journals) of the scientific and pharmacometrics community, provided access to a physiologically‐based PK (PBPK) model for an mAb and a viral dynamic PD model of SARS‐CoV‐2. 14 This was a pivotal starting point to address the drug development questions during a pandemic.…”

Open Science por defecto. La nueva normalidad para la investigación

“…Aunque parezca evidente y que no hay marcha atrás (Barbour y Borchert, 2020), es preciso analizar en qué condiciones las editoriales abren esos artículos. Así, en un estudio reciente (Arrizabalaga et al, 2020) hemos analizado 5.611 artículos sobre la COVID-19 en PubMed, y si bien el 97% están publicados técnicamente en abierto, casi un 70% de ellos pertenecen a una categoría de acceso abierto bronce, es decir, que las editoriales los abren pero sin dotarles de licencias de reutilización, lo cual implica que, en cualquier momento, podrían volver a cerrar el acceso.…”

Trustworthy or not? Research data on COVID-19 in data repositories

“…Most of the papers on COVID-19 are open access ( Aristovnik et al, 2020 ; Arrizabalaga et al, 2020 ). Additionally, an important number of preprints—preliminary reports that have not been peer-reviewed—have been posted on preprint servers such as medRxiv, with nearly 8000 articles, and bioRxiv, with more than 2000 articles ( Fig.…”