Now, the pandemic has entered its third year and there are reports that free access to COVID-19 research is coming to an end. If so, it means that the publisher has decided that the COVID-19 emergency has ended before the world health authorities. But is this really the case? The
alarm was ringing in August when a prominent open access advocate warned that COVID-related research was back behind the paywall. “It is both disappointing and worrying,” wrote Robert Kiley, head of strategy at cOAlition S in Strasbourg, France, a funder supporting the Open Access Program S program.
Keelly cites an analysis of the impact of COVID-19 open sharing commitments commissioned and co-funded by the London-based charity Wellcome, funding agency UK Research and Innovation, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington. “Several [publishers] have begun reintroducing paywalls,” the newspaper said, which was released online in June before peer review.
But it has no solid evidence to prove this claim, said Hannah Hope, head of public research at Wellcome, who said Wellcome’s University leads the effort to carry out research in public health emergencies. (Keeley also worked at Wellcome before. Hope said the sentence was partly due to the “hypothesis” of the interviewees in the study, and also because the author pointed out that some publishers have closed the online COVID-19 information portal. After contacting Nature , the author released a second version, but without the sentence.
Who is free?
So far, Nature found only one publisher on some previously free studies The paper was paid for. London-based BMJ decided this year to make COVID-19 research in most journals free of charge only one year from the date of publication. But the policy does not include COVID-19 papers on flagship medical journal " British Medical Journal " , which has no time limit, the publisher told "Nature" .
British Medical Journal spokesman Caroline White White said nearly half of all BMJ's output was free by 2020, but that became "unsustainable." On scale, it's often difficult to identify content that is purely COVID-19, as many papers mention the pandemic , but it doesn't actually involve it. All paid content related to COVID is still available for free on request.
spokespersons from other publishers -- including Giants Elsevier, Springer Nature and Willy -- told Nature that they are keeping their COVID-19 research papers free. ( Nature magazine's news team is editorially independent of its publisher Springer Nature. National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, is responsible for operating PubMed Central repository, the library told Nature magazine that it has not received any requests to withdraw the free version of COVID-19 papers that many publishers have placed there.
paywall is coming
June’s analysis also cites an opinion article from January. The author is Virginia Barber, former editor of the Open Access journal. “We are starting to see publishers transfer papers behind the subscription barrier,” Barbour wrote, co-head of the Office of Academic Communications at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia.
Barber said the statement is based on observations in 2021, i.e., a Some Esevier COVID-19 articles cannot be viewed for free. But publishers say the papers are soon free again: technical failures have caused some articles to be mislabeled as unmarked. Esevier closed its "Coronavirus Research Center" a year later, but the closure did not affect the availability of its COVID-19 research content.
However, publishers have different views on their long-term strategy. Nature magazine contacted some people, including SAGE Press in Thousand Oaks, California, and NEJM Group in Waltham, Massachusetts, said they have no plans to put COVID-19 content behind a paywall, but will be viewed forever for free.Others are more cautious. “We plan to continue doing this as long as the public health emergency continues,” Elsevier said. A Springer Nature spokesman also made a similar statement. Meanwhile, Wiley writes, “Our COVID series will still be available until the end of 2023”.
broader debate
speculation about when or whether journals will close visits to COVID-19 research is part of a larger debate about which scientific research should be free. With the spread of the open access movement, many primary research, especially in the medical field, are being freely read and reused, although debates on how to best fund this are still vortex.
In his August post, Kiley observed that publishers have now agreed to open paid studies for public health emergencies four times in seven years - against Zika , Ebola , COVID-19, and earlier this year, monkeypox . He urged open access should not be "determined by the urgency of the disease" but should be applicable to all studies. He noted that the world faces other challenges, such as climate change and food and water security. Also in August, supporters of the Open Access Research launched a multi-year campaign to make climate and biodiversity research permanently free. How
handles paid research that subscribed journals still hold copyright is another unresolved tension – the debate over urgent release of coronavirus content has also helped surface.
