The COVID-19 crisis has underlined just how fast and open science publishing can be — when scientists want it that way. Researchers working on the pandemic are sharing preliminary results on preprint servers and institutional websites at unprecedented rates, embracing the kind of early, public sharing that physicists and mathematicians have practised for decades. Journals have whisked manuscripts through to formal publication in record time, aided by researchers who have rapidly peer-reviewed the studies. And dozens of publishers and journals, including Elsevier, Springer Nature and the New England Journal of Medicine, have made coronavirus research — new and old — free to read. They have pledged to continue doing so for the duration of the outbreak, and have encouraged or, in some instances, required researchers to post their manuscripts on preprint servers.
Even before COVID-19 spread around the globe, momentum was growing to share results early online and to make work open access. The coronavirus publishing frenzy has underlined the worth of these objectives, says Cameron Neylon, a researcher on scholarly communications at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. “If we think openness of communication is valuable in a crisis, it should surely be valuable in normal times as well,” he says.
