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. Today, we’re happy to report that PLOS ONE published its first COVID-19 paper since we started fast-tracking submissions on January 31st.
Science leaders have 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. We always push all PLOS content 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.
Dr Yuan adds: “This study allows us to compare radiologic findings with the mortality of patients infected with COVID-19.”
Since February 1st, 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, and we are happy to make contributions to this effort. We are forwarding all of our submissions to the World Health Organization for their database of publications on coronavirus disease (COVID-19).
We are compiling all our Coronavirus-related papers into a Collection as they publish. Meanwhile, you can keep tabs on our Disease Forecasting and Surveillance Channel for curated research related to coronavirus. We encourage all researchers investigating pressing issues like disease outbreaks and climate change, to also consider posting a Preprint. You can find the most recent preprints relating to the coronavirus outbreak – posted across bioRxiv and medRxiv on this search link.
