06/23/2021

Open and Faster Scholarly Communication in a Post-COVID World

The opportunities COVID created weren't all bad

Editor's note: Today's post is by Liz Bal. Liz is director of open research services at Jisc, a non-profit organization focused on providing digital services and solutions for research and education. A biologist by education, Liz has more than 10 years of experience in open access publishing and scholarly communication. Prior to joining Jisc, she held various publishing roles at BioMed Central and Springer Nature.

The pandemic presented an urgency for effective science to inform decision-making and has shown just how fast and open scholarly communication can be. Researchers shared their preliminary results on preprint servers and institutional repositories at unprecedented rates, inspiring various preprint peer-review initiatives. Journal publishers processed manuscripts from submission to publication in record time. And much of what we know about COVID-19 has been learned through data sharing and cooperation at the international level, with the use of critical data-sharing infrastructure.

While the research community has responded with an extraordinary level of openness, speed, and collaboration, it has also brought to the fore some of the key challenges we still face in the transition to open research – and the opportunities they represent.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.