Science advisors call for open access to COVID-19 research - March 13, 2020

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of Science and Technology Policy

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
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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