THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of Science and
Technology Policy
FOR
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 13, 2020
March 13, 2020
President Trump’s
Science Advisor and Government Science Leaders from Around the World call on
Publishers to make all COVID-19-Related Research Publically Available
Publically Available
Research and Data is More Important than Ever as we Combat the COVID-19
Outbreak
Today,
the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)
and Member of President Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force, Dr. Kelvin Droegemeier,
and government science leaders including science ministers and chief science
advisors from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the
Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Singapore, and the United Kingdom are asking
publishers to make all COVID-19-related research and data immediately available
to the public.
“We,
as national leaders on science policy, applaud the efforts of researchers to
understand and prevent the infection and spread of COVID-19. We also greatly
appreciate the funders and publishers who play the important role of
supporting, reviewing, and communicating research outcomes and making
publications and data available to the global community for scientific research
and public awareness.
“To
assist efforts to contain and mitigate the rapidly evolving COVID-19 pandemic,
basic science research and innovation will be vital to addressing this global
crisis. Given the urgency of the situation, it is particularly important that
scientists and the public can access research outcomes as soon as
possible. The countries listed below urge publishers to voluntarily agree
to make their COVID-19 and coronavirus-related publications, and the available
data supporting them, immediately accessible in PubMed Central and other
appropriate public repositories, such as the World Health Organization’s COVID
database, to support the ongoing public health emergency response
efforts,” the government science leaders wrote in the call-to-action.
Science
leaders requested that existing and new articles be made available in
machine-readable format to allow full text and data mining with rights accorded
for research re-use and secondary analysis. This will allow researchers to
apply artificial intelligence to answer critical questions and identify trends
and relevant information in their efforts to characterize this novel virus and
address the global health crisis.
Please
find the full transcript to the scholarly publishing community attached.
For
more information about the Coronavirus, please visit:https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html.
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