Have Some Signatories of a Covid-19 Literature Open Access Agreement Reneged on Their Promise?

Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva, Hilary I. Okagbue

Abstract


Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is one of humanity’s greatest modern socio-medical challenges. Cognizant of the serious nature of this pandemic, and before it was characterized as such, the Wellcome Trust in the UK took the bold and important initiative to call on publishers to make any research related to COVID-19 open access (OA) and encourage them to adopt open data (OD) policies. In a public statement, many publishers of subscription-based and OA journals agreed that all literature related to COVID-19 would be OA as a service to the public, society and humanity. Despite that stated agreement, evidence indicates that not all literature pertaining to this pandemic or virus is OA. In thus study, Web of Science data (August 4, 2021) indicates that 83.7% of 2020 COVID-19-related literature (78.4% for 2021; average of 81.2%) is OA, i.e., an average of 19.8% in 2020 and 2021 was not OA. It is not clear why that literature is not OA. Signatories of that Wellcome Trust-coordinated statement should offer a public explanation, or abandon being signatories.

Keywords


Open Access; Open Data; Open Science; Public Health; Transparency

Full Text:

PDF

References


Belli, S., Mugnaini, R., Baltà, J., & Abadal, E. (2020). Coronavirus mapping in scientific publications: When science advances rapidly and collectively, is access to this knowledge open to society? Scientometrics, 124(3), 2661–2685. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03590-7

Gkiouras, K., Nigdelis, M.P., Grammatikopoulou, M.G., & Goulis, D.G. (2020). Tracing open data in emergencies: The case of the COVID-19 pandemic. European Journal of Clinical Investigation, 50(9), e13323. https://doi.org/10.1111/eci.13323

Haddaway, N.R., Akl, E.A., Page, M.J., Welch, V.A., Keenan, C., & Lotfi, T. (2020). Open synthesis and the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 126, 184–191. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclinepi.2020.06.032

Horbach, S. P. J. M. (2020). Pandemic publishing: Medical journals strongly speed up their publication process for COVID-19. Quantitative Science Studies, 1(3), 1056–1067. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00076

Internet Archive. (2022). https://web.archive.org/web/20201002135557/https://wellcome.org/press-release/publishers-make-coronavirus-covid-19-content-freely-available-and-reusable (last accessed: February 4, 2022)

LitCovid. (2022). LitCovid. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/research/coronavirus/ (last accessed: February 4, 2022)

Plotkin, S. A., Offit, P. A., DeStefano, F., Larson, H. J., Arora, N. K., Zuber, P., Fombonne, E., Sejvar, J., Lambert, P. H., Hviid, A., Halsey, N., Garçon, N., Peden, K., Pollard, A. J., Markowitz, L. E., & Glanz, J. (2020). The science of vaccine safety: Summary of meeting at Wellcome Trust. Vaccine, 38(8), 1869–1880. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2020.01.024

Shamoo, A.E. (2020). Validate the integrity of research data on COVID 19. Accountability in Research, 27(6), 325-326. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2020.1787838

Teixeira da Silva, J.A. (2020a). Misinformation in COVID-19 media and literature, with an emphasis on open data policies. Journal of Advocacy, Research and Education, 7(2), 25-29.

Teixeira da Silva, J.A. (2020b). An alert to COVID-19 literature in predatory publishing venues. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 46(5), 102187. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2020.102187

Teixeira da Silva, J.A., Bornemann-Cimenti, H., & Tsigaris, P. (2021a). Optimizing peer review to minimize the risk of retracting COVID-19-related literature. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 24(1), 21-26. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-020-09990-z

Teixeira da Silva, J.A., & Nazarovets, S. (2022) Publication history: A double DOI-based method to store and/or monitor information about published and corrected academic literature. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 53(2), 85-108. https://doi.org/10.3138/jsp.53.2.2017-0017

Teixeira da Silva, J.A., Tsigaris, P., & Erfanmanesh, M.A. (2021b). Publishing volumes in major databases related to Covid-19. Scientometrics, 126(1), 831-842. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03675-3

Thelwall, M. (2020). Coronavirus research before 2020 is more relevant than ever, especially when interpreted for COVID-19. Quantitative Science Studies, 1(4), 1381–1395. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00083

Wellcome Trust. (2020a). Sharing research data and findings relevant to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. https://wellcome.ac.uk/coronavirus-covid-19/open-data (last accessed: February 4, 2022)

Wellcome Trust. (2020b). Publishers make coronavirus (COVID-19) content freely available and reusable. https://wellcome.org/press-release/publishers-make-coronavirus-covid-19-content-freely-available-and-reusable (last accessed: February 4, 2022)

Wellcome Trust. (2020c). Open access: how COVID-19 will change the way research findings are shared. https://wellcome.org/news/open-access-how-covid-19-will-change-way-research-findings-are-shared (last accessed: February 4, 2022)

Wellcome Trust. (2022). Grant funding. https://wellcome.org/grant-funding (last accessed: February 4, 2022)




DOI: https://doi.org/10.17509/edulib.v12i2.47333

DOI (PDF): https://doi.org/10.17509/edulib.v12i2.47333.g22785

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2022 Edulib

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.