Open Research & Scholarly Publications

Open Access in a time of emergency

The Covid-19 pandemic has helped bring into sharp focus the need for access to reliable sources of information. Amongst the stories of ‘quack’ remedies to the virus, and wider conspiracy theories and misinformation which have appeared in some places online, there are also more positive stories. For instance, a sizeable number of academic publishers have, temporarily at least, removed paywall restrictions from their content. JISC have helpfully kept a record of those content providers where this applies with help from the academic librarian community.

In a separate development the US based Internet Archive have launched a so-called ‘National Emergency Library’. This has prompted a fierce debate around copyright and the ethical arguments for and against such an approach, as it has transpired a sizeable amount of the content released by the Internet Archive is still under copyright and its distribution therefore is legally protected.

The pandemic has also thrown attention on the role of ‘pre prints’ in disseminating information on emerging threats. ‘Preprints’ typically represent manuscripts under submission which have not yet been through the peer review verification process used by academic journals to assess which submissions to publish. The issue is that the peer review and journal editorial process takes time, and so the publication of pre prints allows for research findings to be shared quickly, albeit without the added value and verification which the peer review process can offer. There are a variety of different pre print servers online which tend to be differentiated by subject area, the main ones for Biological and Medical Sciences being bioRxiv and MedRxiv.

Some major research funders in the Medical Sciences, such as the Wellcome Trust in their revised open access policy to come into effect in 2021, are now mandating that researchers receiving their funding make their research available in this way where there is a medical or public health emergency to be addressed. The role of preprints has previously been noted in relation to the Ebola and Zika outbreaks in 2014-5. Despite the evident value in providing early access to research findings and medical trial results related to an ongoing health emergency, research has shown only a small proportion of research into the Ebola and Zika outbreaks were provided in advance of formal publication as pre-prints (Johansson et al, 2018).

In terms of the longer term impact of the Coronavirus on the open access and academic publishing landscape, this is hard to ascertain. On the one hand the outbreak will undoubtedly have economic consequences, predominantly negative, to which the global Universities sector will not be spared. This in turn will impact upon the buying power of Universities to acquire content from publishers and may trigger a reappraisal of the economics around scholarly publishing and its long-term sustainability. This comes against the backdrop of the significant change and disruption threatened by Plan S, a new open access framework signed up to by several major research funders which intends to facilitate immediate open access to research and to encourage publishers to transform their business models away from subscription models toward open access alternatives.

In a detailed piece looking at the impact of the current Covid-19 outbreak on academic publishing and open access, Dr Samuel Moore, based within our Centre for Post Digital Cultures, voices the hope that the current crisis can provide impetus to non-commercial community approaches to realise open access. As recent events have shown the future is uncertain and hard to predict, but there is the prospect that the long-term implications of the Covid-19 outbreak on the academic publishing landscape may prove to be far reaching.