But then, this may be the last time you have to do it.
“The argument for open access is so obvious that it’s painful to have to repeat it,” says Schekman, a 2013 Nobel laureate and biologist at UC Berkeley. “The public will pay for the investigation and yet cannot read the investigation. Doctors do not have access to literature: early-stage biotechnology companies at the forefront of discovery cannot obtain licenses.”
“Obviously that’s the way it is,” he says.
Under the strain of a global fitness crisis, the argument for openness has emerged. Following calls from the World Health Organization and government leaders, more than 150 publishers, corporations and institutes of studies have agreed to temporarily release all COVID-19 reading content to do so, ensuring that efforts to perceive the virus can continue unmoved.
The result looks like the ultimate epic relay race in history. Dozens, many studies are published daily, with dating queues all over the world. The genetic mutations of the virus, clues about its spread, fill the foundations of knowledge through thousands. And a new culture of knowledge sharing has driven clinical collaboration like never before.
So now the question is: Is this the catalyst that breaks up the bonds of an old publishing model once and for all?
“Possibly it’s the last time we talked about having a specialty in the papers because of a pandemic,” Schekman says.
A new frontier
Outside of public health emergencies, the speed at which research discoveries make their way around the globe is not quite so revolutionary.
In fact, after an investigator has submitted an article to a journal, it can take several months, or even a year or more, for the paper to see the courtesy of the day.
“It’s often a very slow process,” says Jade Benjamin-Chung, an epidemiologist and lecturer in UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health.
Once published, the content is sealed away from most, available only through hefty site licenses or a charge of about $30 per article. Members of the public, whose taxes fund much of the nation’s scientific output, can view the material only after an embargo period of six months to four years, depending on the journal.
“It’s a racket,” Schekman said.
Things are different now, a pandemic. Most primary journals have temporarily demolished paywalls for COVID-19 content, demonstrating their commitment to helping disease research. Many publishers also offer accelerated documents in COVID-19.
However, although laboratories around the world are generating studies on this disease, magazines cannot keep up. Instead, scholars turn to pre-publication: open-access versions of shared study work prior to the official journal or publication. Scientists publish their manuscripts to open repositories called prepress servers, where others can read and talk about the results.
The servers have exploded with content in months. As of June, more than 5,000 articles on the virus had been published on the main servers of biology and medicine, bioRxiv and medRxiv (pronounced “biofile” and “medfile”).
The appeal of preprints is clear: access and speed. Instant access to scientific literature can save researchers from needlessly repeating experiments, for example. But there is a catch: Preprints have yet to go through peer review—the standard test of good science.
(However, most giant prepress servers have quality measures. Preprints in bioRxiv and medRxiv, for example, are reviewed through subject and personal experts, with stricter filters for COVID-19 content).
“A huge advantage of rapid publication of information is that it can immediately inform other research,” Benjamin-Chung says. “But what it means is that if we’re going to use a preprint to inform our study, we have to review it very carefully ourselves.”
With his study team, Benjamin-Chung studied knowledge of COVID-19 tests in the United States and other countries, applying statistical models to estimate which count of the first case in the United States might have been more robust.
Her team’s estimate? About nine times more than what was reported, or roughly 6.3 million infections by April 18, according to the preprint.
“If we primarily test people who have symptoms—especially those that are most symptomatic—we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg,” Benjamin-Chung says. “There’s a lot of transmission that’s probably going on in the community that we’re not capturing.”
The style has been illuminated through articles and preprints, adding studies that have randomly examined asymptomatic Americans to detect the virus and studies examining the accuracy of diagnostic tests.
“We’re looking at studies from around the world,” she says. “And if other researchers didn’t post their preprints, we couldn’t have developed our model as rapidly.”
Better faster stronger
When it comes to modernizing academic publications on the occasion of a pandemic, preprints are only one component of the equation. There is an ocean of vital discoveries available, but also an ocean of studies, some deep, some dubious, to pass.
Again, open access will be essential, researchers say. If one of the main bottlenecks in the publication is the long peer review process, the solution resembles a global network of scientists deployed at the same time.
One such coalition is Rapid Reviews: COVID-19, a state-of-the-art open access magazine recently presented through UC Berkeley and MIT Press. Designed to strike a balance between speed and rigor, the magazine uses device learning software (developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) with a global team of volunteers to meet and sift through dozens of pre-prints each week. By searching the Internet for data such as social media mentions and educational reports, the team temporarily identifies promising studies that require review.
The center of this style is broad and open to literature, says Hildy Fong Baker, editor-in-chief of the magazine.
“We need to have an editorial ecosystem that works for both scientists who conduct studies and audience members who need to perceive it, and who can have a better life because of it,” says Baker, Executive Director of uc Center. For Global Public Health at Berkeley and UC Berkeley-UCSF Center for Global Health Services Delivery. International relations and the economy. “Free is a key detail of this.”
“We want those open servers to do this job,” she says. “If we didn’t have that, we wouldn’t have anything to do with it again.”
Even newspapers, however, have created its own virtual vanguard: the public. Because everything is open, a type of ad hoc peer review formula has emerged in clinical forums and social media, adopted by researchers around the world.
“If (a study) is of interest, other people look at it and start commenting,” says Martyn T. Smith, professor of toxicology at UC Berkeley.
Earlier this year, two preprints from Germany and China revealed how the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, binds to an enzyme for replication, placing itself in the unique form of the enzyme as a key in a block. (Once activated, this enzyme begins cutting genetic curtain chains from the virus into new baby viruses.)
Armed with those clues, Smith and others tested more than 2,500 herbal compounds in a 3-d PC simulation to see if any of those chemicals can bind to the enzyme, filling the keyhole and blocking the virus.
The goal, Smith says, is to identify herbal foods and supplements that can provide relief compared to coronavirus in the absence of approved drugs or a vaccine.
“We are very interested in the concept of, what explains why other people are vulnerable to the virus and others are not?” Smith said. “And we believe that the regime can play an important role.”
In the end, the test (not yet peer-reviewed) found that flavonoid-rich foods, which add many vegetables, completion, and some teas, can prevent infection. (Several recent studies have reached similar conclusions).
Shortly after the published prepress, other researchers noted that overconsumption of compounds, including herbal ones, can be harmful, to which Smith responded temporarily. (The test warns of the intake of flavonoids above the upper one).
“The point of having published studies like this is that knowledge is there for other qualified people to evaluate,” Schekman says. “It’s not just a newspaper article, it’s an article with knowledge.”
‘A cowboy mentality’
For all its advantages, the preprints have grown slowly.
The first prepress server, arXiv, was introduced in 1991 at the Los Alamos National Laboratory as a remote depot for new physics jobs. While preprints have been popular in physics, mathematics and computer science, they have recently spread to biology and medicine, with the launch of bioRxiv and medRxiv in 2013 and 2019, respectively.
Schekman says this trajectory has to do with the omnipotent retention of scholarships from publishers, and with the request for replacement by researchers.
“Before, magazines had a very strict embargo policy,” says Schekman, former editor-in-chief of open access eLife magazine. “Business journals like Cell used to tell their authors that if they even communicate on those effects at a symposium, we can consider the article.
“They were forced to give in to that.”
Today, almost all major journals allow or, in some cases, inspire researchers to publish their studies on prepress servers prior to publication. Many magazines have even promised on their websites that this will have no chance of publishing an article in all areas.
They’ve enjoyed a meteoric since then. According to an eLife study, more preprints were published in bioRxiv in 2018 than in the last 4 years combined.
But resistance persists. Even now, some magazines previously share the print. Others are ambiguous about their policies.
Habits take a while to change, Schekman says. On the one hand, researchers fear being “recovered”, seeing their experiments and knowledge copied through others. A researcher in Schekman’s box had refused to publish an examination of the bioRxiv because it would “give credit to its competitors,” he recalls.
“(The researcher) sought to retain the effects for as long as possible,” Schekman says. “It’s an attitude, but I reject it.”
“It’s a component of culture: the poisonous culture of erudition that favors the individual over collegiality and cooperation,” he continues. “It’s a cowboy mentality.”
At the same time, magazines’ messages about preprints were far from shining. In 2016, Emilie Marcus, then mobile editor-in-chief and CEO of Cell Press, discouraged researchers from citing preprints, saying it would be a “pseudo-article that infiltrates credibility through a backdoor.”
The effect of such signage was transparent and, in some cases, crippling. According to a 2018 review published in the open access journal PLOS Medicine, preprints particularly accelerated the spread of studies of the Zika outbreak 2015-2016 and the Ebola outbreak 2013-2016. But only 5% of articles on the two diseases were published for the first time in the form of pre-publications, according to the review.
Crucial knowledge was also kept secret. According to a 2016 WHO bulletin, it was the “gaps in existing knowledge-sharing mechanisms” that ultimately blocked clinical progress in Ebola. WHO has called for open access to knowledge of long-term public fitness emergencies.
“You can’t sit on this stuff,” says Ann Glusker, Berkeley’s sociology, demography, and quantitative research librarian and a former epidemiologist. “If you put it out there, you’re going to inform others about how to proceed, and you’re going to save thousands, millions, of lives, potentially.
“Even if she deserves to keep a critical eye on preprinting, they’re all we have now,” she says. “You can’t just put your thumbs through your nose and say, ‘Oh, knowledge is rarely very available.'”
‘There will be a revolution’
For Benjamin-Chung, the epidemiologist at Berkeley, the hope is that the existing outbreak of knowledge sharing will spread in a post-pandemic world.
As things stand, even open magazines that require knowledge sharing have weak or fragile compliance, he says, with the pursuit of delayed, inaccessible or completely lost knowledge.
“Everyone recognizes that maintaining knowledge for now will only save us from advancing coVID-19,” Benjamin-Chung says. “What I would like to see after the end of this (pandemic) is that the way we calculate knowledge becomes stronger.
“If you say that this article includes open knowledge, I would very much like to see a link to access knowledge there.”
For this to happen, a paradigm shift will be required, from researchers accustomed to accumulating knowledge to business journals that have long given them reasons to do so.
And the tension is high: the White House now envisages a policy that requires all federally funded studies to be published freely, including outdoor pandemics. (Publishers amassed to protest, writing a letter to President Donald Trump warning that the policy would “jeopardize the assets of American organizations” and “force us to cede it to the rest of the world.”
Without these laws, publishers will inevitably cease to be open once the sky begins to clear.
At least they’ll try.