[D66] Viral Open Access in Times of Global Pandemic

[Antid Oto]

  Viral Open Access in Times of Global Pandemic

By
Vincent W.J.
punctumbooks.pubpub.org
4 min
View Original 
<https://getpocket.com/redirect?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpunctumbooks.pubpub.org%2Fpub%2Fviral-open-access-global-pandemic-covid-19-corona>

Let’s recap.

The initial report 
<https://www.who.int/csr/don/05-january-2020-pneumonia-of-unkown-cause-china/en/> 
of the WHO on an outbreak of pneumonia in Wuhan, Hubei province, China, 
dates to December 31, 2019. The first articles in medical journals 
appear in mid-January, for example in the open-access /International 
Journal for Infectious Diseases/ 
<https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijid.2020.01.009>. Rather than wait for 
publishers to release publicly funded knowledge to the public, a massive 
online archiving project publicly released 
<https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z3b3v5/archivists-are-bypassing-paywalls-to-share-studies-about-coronaviruses> 
more than 5,000 unpaywalled articles 
<https://the-eye.eu/public/Papers/CoronaVirusPapers/> on coronaviruses 
on Sci-Hub in the same month.3 On January 30, 2020 the WHO declared 
<https://app.getpocket.com/read/2921065421> a global health emergency.

On January 31, a statement 
<https://wellcome.ac.uk/press-release/sharing-research-data-and-findings-relevant-novel-coronavirus-covid-19-outbreak> 
was published on the website of the Wellcome Trust, in which a number of 
publishers and journals, including publishing oligopolists Elsevier, 
Springer Nature, and Taylor and Francis, agreed that

    all peer-reviewed research publications relevant to the outbreak are
    made immediately open access, or freely available at least for the
    duration of the outbreak

The term “COVID-19” was announced 
<https://www.todayonline.com/world/wuhan-novel-coronavirus-named-covid-19-who> 
on February 11, and on March 11 the WHO declared 
<https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19---11-march-2020> 
the COVID-19 public health crisis a “pandemic.” Two days later, on March 
13, chief science advisors from twelve countries released a statement 
<https://wellcome.ac.uk/sites/default/files/covid19-open-access-letter.pdf>, 
relayed 
<http://listserv.crl.edu/wa.exe?A2=LIBLICENSE-L;23fe98a3.2003&FT=&P=&H=&S=> 
by the Office of Science and Technology Policy of the White House, 
urging “publishers to voluntarily agree to make their COVID-19 and 
coronavirus-related publications, and the available data supporting 
them, immediately accessible in PubMed Central4 and other appropriate 
public repositories.”

In response, several of the signatories of the January 31 declaration, 
including the oligopolists, agreed 
<https://wellcome.ac.uk/press-release/publishers-make-coronavirus-covid-19-content-freely-available-and-reusable> 
to further make “all of their COVID-19 and coronavirus-related 
publications, and the available data supporting them, immediately 
accessible in PubMed Central (PMC) and other public repositories.”

The Wellcome Trust statement raises the fascinating question concerning 
what type of research is exactly “relevant” to the outbreak. As the 
outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic is not only tied to the DNA of the 
SARS-CoV-2 virus, its protein structures, and the way interacts with the 
human body, but also the field of medicine, and therefore also 
healthcare, and healthcare funding, and health education, and thus also 
much broader questions of state organization, economic structures, 
educational resources – in brief, all the ways in which humans have 
ordered the world. If we want to come to a full /understanding/ of the 
outbreak, /all/ peer-reviewed research in medical, STEM, social science, 
and the humanities is potentially “relevant” and should therefore be 
made open. But that is certainly not how Elsevier c.s. see it.

Then there is also the question of what “duration” means here. The 
outbreak started officially when the WHO declared it a public health 
concern on January 30, and for-profit publishers acted a day later. But 
when will that end? When is all this research that is not temporarily 
released to the public going back behind lock and key? If predictions 
<https://www.businessinsider.com.au/coronavirus-outbreak-seasonality-not-disappear-2020-2> 
that COVID-19 may become endemic to the human population and circulate 
on an annual basis like the flu becomes reality, its duration is 
indefinite, but the free access to medical research most certainly won’t 
be. As HIV/AIDS researchers have long known, even though a pandemic may 
claim millions of victims, the paywall remains shut as long as the 
spotlight isn’t on.

The criminal hypocrisy of the publishing industry’s current professions 
of minimal decency becomes clear once you check the archive of the 
Wellcome Trust and find similar calls for open access concerning the 
Ebola epidemic 
<https://wellcome.ac.uk/press-release/sharing-research-findings-and-data-relevant-ebola-outbreak-democratic-republic-congo> 
of 2018 and the Zika outbreak 
<https://wellcome.ac.uk/press-release/statement-data-sharing-public-health-emergencies> 
in 2016. In neither case do we find the compassionate and understanding 
signatures of Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor and Francis, or many 
others. One gets the impression that only now that a disease affects the 
Global North, suddenly open access is something of a moral obligation, 
an obligation that was not so urgently felt when tens of thousands died 
in Africa. The position of academic for-profit publishers is therefore 
clear: the deaths of some are more problematic (for their bottom line 
and “reputation”) than others.

Opening access went properly viral when schools and universities closed 
down in the Global North. Suddenly, also non-medical research was made 
freely accessible. Cambridge University Press opened up 
<https://www.cambridge.org/core/what-we-publish/textbooks> its textbooks 
“until the end of May 2020”; more than 75 publishers made their 
publications freely accessible 
<https://www.proquest.com/blog/pqblog/2020/Coronavirus-Impacted-Libraries-Get-Unlimited-Access-to-Ebook-Central.html> 
to any institution with a ProQuest account “through mid-June”; Harvard 
University Press made its Loeb Classical Library freely available 
<https://twitter.com/HarvardUPLondon/status/1239924881023737858> to 
school and libraries “until June 30”; and several university presses 
made their books freely available 
<https://about.muse.jhu.edu/resources/freeresourcescovid19/> on Project 
MUSE until May 31 or June 30, 2020.5 Again, only now that school 
children and students in the Global North are confronted with a limited 
access to physical learning materials – a daily problem for millions of 
students around the globe – it appears possible to open up those 
precious digital files.

As with the temporary opening of access to COVID-19-related articles, 
the academic presses offering “discretionary” unpaywalling – to a random 
subset of their catalogs with unknown or poorly argued relevance for the 
catastrophe 
<https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/03/18/live-updates-latest-news-coronavirus-and-higher-education> 
that has hit 
<https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Coronavirus-Is-Upending/248175?cid=cp275> 
our education systems – are doing nothing but engaging in last-minute, 
haphazard PR, hoping that the realization that publicly funded knowledge 
is inaccessible to most of us will not dawn too soon on the anxious tax 
payer, confronted with their restless child at home or scrambling to 
assemble an impromptu online “learning experience.”

It is not only in times of crisis that publicly available knowledge can 
save lives. It always has this potential, and it’s our choice.


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.tuxtown.net/pipermail/d66/attachments/20200320/647aaf47/attachment-0001.html>