Archives des mots-clés : COVID-19

Publication by association: the Covid-19 pandemic reveals relationships between authors and editors

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Authors : Clara Locher, David Moher, Ioana Cristea, Florian Naudet

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the rush to scientific and political judgments on the merits of hydroxychloroquine was fuelled by dubious papers which may have been published because the authors were not independent from the practices of the journals in which they appeared.

This example leads us to consider a new type of illegitimate publishing entity, “self-promotion journals” which could be deployed to serve the instrumentalisation of productivity-based metrics, with a ripple effect on decisions about promotion, tenure, and grant funding.

URL : Publication by association: the Covid-19 pandemic reveals relationships between authors and editors

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/64u3s

Scientific globalism during a global crisis: research collaboration and open access publications on COVID-19

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Authors : Jenny J. Lee, John P. Haupt

This study sought to understand the nature of scientific globalism during a global crisis, particularly COVID-19. Findings show that scientific globalism occurs differently when comparing COVID-19 publications with non-COVID-19 publications during as well as before the pandemic.

Despite the tense geopolitical climate, countries increased their proportion of international collaboration and open-access publications during the pandemic. However, not all countries engaged more globally.

Countries that have been more impacted by the crisis and those with relatively lower GDPs tended to participate more in scientific globalism than their counterparts.

DOI : https://dx.doi.org/10.1007%2Fs10734-020-00589-0

Pandemic Publishing: Medical journals drastically speed up their publication process for Covid-19

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Author : Serge P.J.M. Horbach

In times of public crises, including the current Covid-19 pandemic, rapid dissemination of relevant scientific knowledge is of paramount importance. The duration of scholarly journals’ publication process is one of the main factors hindering quick delivery of new information.

While proper editorial assessment and peer review obviously require some time, turnaround times for medical journals can be up to several months, which is undesirable in the era of a crisis. Following initiatives of medical journals and scholarly publishers to accelerate their publication process, this study assesses whether medical journals have indeed managed to speed up their publication process for Covid-19 related articles.

It studies the duration of 14 medical journals’ publication process both during and prior to the current pandemic. Assessing a total of 669 articles, the study concludes that medical journals have indeed drastically accelerated the publication process for Covid-19 related articles since the outbreak of the pandemic. Compared to articles published in the same journals before the pandemic, turnaround times have decreased on average by 49%.

The largest decrease in number of days between submission and publication of articles was due to a decrease in the number of days required for peer review. For articles not related to Covid-19, no acceleration of the publication process is found.

While the acceleration of journals’ publication process is laudable from the perspective of quick information dissemination, it also raises concerns relating to the quality of the peer review process and the quality of the resulting publications.

URL : https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.18.045963

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

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Authors : Olatz Arrizabalaga, David Otaegui, Itziar Vergara, Julio Arrizabalaga, Eva Méndez

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, agreeing upon funders’ and researchers’ instigation.

Methods

This work uses Unpaywall, OpenRefine and PubMed to analyse the level of openness of articles 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 (335 and 116 articles, respectively).

Regarding the levels of openness, 88.8% of the SARS CoV-2 papers are freely available; similar rates were found for the other coronaviruses. Deeper analysis showed that (i) 67.4% of articles belong to an undefined Bronze category; (ii) 76.4% of all OA papers don’t carry any license, followed by 10.4% which display restricted licensing. These patterns were found to be repeated in the three 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.

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

DOI : https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.24136.1