Open Access and Open Science are critical, especially in times of crisis. The COVID-19 outbreak shows how important it is for medical professionals, scientific experts, and every member of the public to have immediate access to the latest science. Equal access to the latest research can assuage public fears or spur government action. PLOS ONE published its first COVID-19 paper since it first started fast-tracking submissions on January 31, 2020.
Science leaders recently requested that the publishing community make their content open and re-usable. PLOS already supports, and calls on others to support, COVID-19 research being shared such that it can be centrally text- and data-mined, and also versioned in places where it can be most conveniently discovered by those tackling this crisis in real time. All PLOS content are pushed to PubMed Central.
The study was conducted by Mingli Yuan and colleagues from the Central Hospital of Wuhan, Hubei province, China. The researchers studied 27 patients infected with COVID-19 and admitted to the Central Hospital of Wuhan. In this patient group, the authors associated clinical features identified from computed tomography (CT) scans of patients’ lungs with eventual outcomes. They scored patients based on features they observed such as ground glass opacity, abnormality on both sides, and widespread distribution of pathology in the lungs, to produce an overall severity score for each patient.
Since February 1, 2020, PLOS’ family of journals have received approximately 175 coronavirus-related submissions. This paper had a turnaround time of less than 21 days from submission to acceptance. A fast, open and transparent process of publishing reliable, peer reviewed science and its underlying data is an important contribution towards tackling this outbreak. The submissions are forwarded to the World Health Organisation for their database of publications on coronavirus disease (COVID-19).
PLOS is compiling all of its Coronavirus-related papers into a collection as these are published. Meanwhile, Disease Forecasting and Surveillance Channel can be visited for curated research related to coronavirus. PLOS is encouraging all researchers investigating pressing issues like disease outbreaks and climate change, to consider posting a Preprint.
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