STM Publishing: A Cross Road or a Cross to Repurpose
March 18, 2020
The coronavirus, officially known as COVID-19, has upended the world. In the face of death, the world has shown its best and worst sides. Despite the global pandemic, society keeps chugging forward and humans are forced to adapt. Humans are washing their hands more and businesses are actively allowing their employees to telecommute. The biggest benefit is that the medical and science fields are actively pooling their knowledge to find a cure and create a COVID-19 vaccine. If profit was the main goal, however, the COVID-19 knowledge would be sold to the highest builder. The Los Angeles Times explains how for-profit science publishing could end, “COVID-19 Could Kill The For-Profit Science Publishing Model. That Would Be A Good Thing.”
Sharing scientific research information in real time is not standard and it is an exception to all practices. The amount information about SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes corona virus) on PubMed now amounts to more than four hundred articles. More information its supposed to help in a crisis.
The US government, however, does not follow the belief that more information is better. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention canceled a briefing with infectious disease expert Nancy Messonnier. The CDC Web site also removed information about the number of people tested for corona virus. It is helpful to know how many people have been tested and infected to determine how fast it is spreading.
The COVID-19 shows how information circulates among medical professionals in a crisis:
“What’s most intriguing about the effect of the COVID-19 crisis on the distribution of scientific research is what it says about the longstanding research publication model: It doesn’t work when a critical need arises for rapid dissemination of data — like now.
The prevailing model today is dominated by for-profit academic publishing houses such as Elsevier, the publisher of such high-impact journals as Cell and the Lancet, and Springer, the publisher of Nature. But it’s under assault by universities and government agencies frustrated at being forced to pay for access to research they’ve funded in the first place.”
Publishers Springer, Elsevier, and other commercial scientific publishers have suspended their paywalls on corona virus information. They explain that the open access will only last the length of the outbreak and will not apply to other research. Researchers, however, want open access for everything be available.
The publishers explain the reason for paywalls and keeping information under lock and key, but researchers, librarians, scientists, and other experts want scientific information shared. Not sharing information, especially about diseases, is not beneficial. China cracked down about the corona outbreak in its media and also locked up its scientific research. This prevented the rest of the world from knowing the true extent of the pandemic and even about the virus origins.
STM publishing? Does the future embrace the models refined since the 17th century?
Whitney Grace, March 18, 2020
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