Open science saves lives: lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

In the last decade Open Science principles have been successfully advocated for and are being slowly adopted in different research communities. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic many publishers and researchers have sped up their adoption of Open Science practices, sometimes embracing them fully and sometimes partially or in a sub-optimal manner. In this article, we express concerns about the violation of some of the Open Science principles and its potential impact on the quality of research output. We provide evidence of the misuses of these principles at different stages of the scientific process. We call for a wider adoption of Open Science practices in the hope that this work will encourage a broader endorsement of Open Science principles and serve as a reminder that science should always be a rigorous process, reliable and transparent, especially in the context of a pandemic where research findings are being translated into practice even more rapidly. We provide all data and scripts at https://osf.io/renxy/ .

Keywords: COVID-19; Methodology; Open science; Peer review.

Fig. 1

Outline of the publication process with its potential issues and our proposed solutions

Fig. 2

Distribution of conflicts of interest according to the type of article for COVID-19 research articles with a submission-to-acceptance time of a day or less, 16 days and 20 days. COI: conflict of interest. Note: for fairness of comparison, we restricted our analysis to articles submitted before 11^th July 2020, since it was the last submission date at which an acceptance time of 20 days could be observed

Fig. 3

Proportion of arXiv preprints shared in the media, broken down by research topic

Fig. 4

A summary of our findings and proposed solutions