With the advent of COVID-19 there has been an uptick of preprints and other publications along with efforts by publishers and vendors to share research materials such as journal articles, books and book chapters, data sets, etc.
Preprints related to COVID-19 are being posted to preprint repositories at a rapid rate. As of March 24, 2020, there are 738 preprints in medRxiv and bioRxiv related to the COVID-19 virus. On Friday March 20, there were 674 preprints. Another preprint resource is the Open Science Framework (OSF) Preprint Repository. OSF Preprints uses SHARE to aggregate search results from a variety of other preprint providers such as arXiv, bioRxiv, PeerJ, CogPrints and others. Over a million preprints are indexed and can be searched by author or keywords, or filtered by subject, preprint server, and most recent contributions.
NIH advocates the use of preprints with the “Reporting Preprints and Other Interim Research Products” (NOT-OD-17-050) notice issued in March 2017. Per NIH, a preprint is: “a complete and public draft of a scientific document. Preprints are typically unreviewed manuscripts written in the style of a peer-reviewed journal article. Scientists issue preprints to speed dissemination, establish priority, obtain feedback, and offset publication bias.”
Publishers are also working to maximize sharing of research findings (journal articles, book chapters, data sets, etc.) related to COVID-19 by making these materials freely available without a subscription. Examples of publishers are noted below:
Publishers:
American Chemical Society (ACS) Chemistry in Coronavirus Research
American Society for Microbiology Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Resources
Cambridge University Press Coronavirus Free Access Collection
Elsevier Novel Coronavirus Information Center
Elsevier is also granting permission to download the full text and data for analysis and data mining. The username and password are noted on the Information Center page.
JAMA Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)
The Lancet COVID-19 Resource Centre
New England Journal of Medicine Coronavirus (Covid-19)
Springer-Nature SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19
Taylor & Francis COVID-19 Resource Center
Wiley Covid-19 Novel Coronavirus Content
Wolters Kluwer COVID-19 (Coronavirus) Resources and Tools
Additional publisher pages for COVID-19 are listed on the International Association of STM Publishers (STM) Coronavirus (Covid-2019) page.
Other:
Allen Institute for AI COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19)
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Allen Institute for AI has partnered with leading research groups to prepare and distribute the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), a free resource of over 44,000 scholarly articles, including over 29,000 with full text, about COVID-19 and the coronavirus family of viruses for use by the global research community.
Digital Science/Dimensions COVID-19 Publications
Dimensions also offers data sets, patents, clinical trials and policy documents related to COVID-19. All content is available as a data set as a Google sheet and Excel file on Figshare.
LitCovid is a curated literature hub for tracking up-to-date scientific information about the 2019 novel Coronavirus. It is the most comprehensive resource on the subject, providing a central access to 1528 (and growing) relevant articles in PubMed. The articles are updated daily and are further categorized by different research topics and geographic locations for improved access.
PubMed Central Public Health Emergency COVID-19 Initiative
On March 13, 2020, the National Science and Technology Advisors from a dozen countries, including the United States, called on publishers to voluntarily agree to make their COVID-19 and coronavirus-related publications, and the available data supporting them, immediately accessible in PubMed Central (PMC). The collection can be used for text mining which enables AI and machine-learning researchers to develop and apply novel approaches that can help answer some of the many questions about coronavirus. See PMC Text Mining Collections.
WHO Global Research on Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19)
WHO is gathering the latest scientific findings and knowledge on coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and compiling the information in a database.
Readings:
‘A completely new culture of doing research.’ Coronavirus outbreak changes how scientists communicate. Science. February 26, 2020.
Publishers make coronavirus (COVID-19) content freely available and reusable. The Wellcome Trust. March 6, 2020.
Global officials call for free access to Covid-19 research. Wired. March 13, 2020.
Interest in coronavirus papers has skyrocketed, analysis finds. Research Professional News. March 20, 2020.
Publishers offering free access to scholarly materials in response to COVID-19. Australian National University. March 20, 2020.
Urgent call for Registered Reports on Coronavirus. The Royal Society Publishing Blog. March 23, 2020.
The Science of This Pandemic Is Moving at Dangerous Speeds. Wired. March 28, 2020.
In the Race to Crack Covid-19, Scientists Bypass Peer Review. Undark. April 1, 2020.
Any questions? Contact publicationsupport@wustl.edu.