11/09/2021

Pandemic Disruptor: Canadian Perspectives on how COVID-19 is Changing Open Access

Part II in a series

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Leigh-Ann Butler, Shannon Cobb and Michael Donaldson. Butler is a policy analyst at the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). Cobb is a science policy advisor at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and was formerly a policy analyst with NSERC. Donaldson is an open access specialist with Canadian Science Publishing and an adjunct professor in the Department of Biology at Carleton University.

As mentioned in Part 1 of this series, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a number of (existing and new) barriers to open scholarship, and has highlighted many new challenges. However, the pandemic also presents new opportunities for creating equitable openness and greater access to research.

Global efforts to increase Open Access (OA) during the COVID-19 pandemic affirm that a closed publishing system continues to dominate the research ecosystem, despite the 17 years since the launch of the  Budapest Open Access Initiative, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.

This year, the majority of scholarly publishers implemented temporary measures like removing paywalls to make COVID-19-related articles and data openly accessible and reusable, and participated in other initiatives to rapidly disseminate research results. However, lessons from past pandemics demonstrate that research production and access need to continue after an outbreak has ended.

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