COVID-19’s Momentum May Drive the ‘Open Science’ Movement Forward

Pelin Ozel

Along with the spread of the respiratory virus COVID-19, financial markets and healthcare providers bear the stress of growing public concerns and an increase in media coverage. Despite this growth in media coverage and public awareness of the urgency of COVID-19, the “open science” movement gains an advantageous momentum.

The spread of the virus has shaped our interactions and behaviors. The Harvard Business Review suggests that COVID-19 and its “severe exogenous demand and supply shocks” related to consumer confidence “can also push the real economy into a contraction.” On one hand, the spread of the virus manifests in our behaviors by straining consumer confidence and the trust between science and the public. On the other hand, COVID-19 provides eustress, or a positive stressor, by shaping how we interact with new research through open science. It is possible that COVID-19 will create an enduring change in the interactions and communication within scientific research as well.

In December of last year, the discourse between advocates for the open science movement and proponents of peer-reviewed journals intensified as the Trump administration set the stage for issuing an executive order. The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act, first introduced in 2013, would force an earlier release of taxpayer funded research and require free access to published manuscripts from research agencies with an annual budget of $100 million or more. This act, the Washington Post clarifies, would “force the public release of journal articles within six months of publication.”

Critics of the open science movement assert that the executive order for open access publishing may push researchers to find funding outside of the federal government through grants provided by private research institutions, pharmaceutical companies, or other benefactors. Although the research funding behind institutions may shift focuses, UNESCO explains that open science publishing would “make science more transparent” to promote “inclusive, effective…scientific collaboration and discovery across scientific fields” beyond funding sources. We are already seeing open access publishing thrive within a community to study COVID-19.

Open access science calls for public, free, and accessible forms of scientific research publishing. Recently, COVID-19 has created a microcosm for open access in epidemiology research. Computational evolutionary biologist Dr. Trevor Bedford at the Fred Hutchinson’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division explains that research on the virus’s genome is shared shortly after sample collection, sometimes between the span of three to six days.

On platforms such as Nextstrain, pathogen genome data are available to public health scientists. The open-source project’s goal aims to “aid epidemiological understanding and improve outbreak response” while providing free, easy access and bypassing the need for peer-reviewed publications. Beyond Nextstrain exist other platforms such as GISAID, specifically facilitating open-access epidemiological discussion on the influenza viruses. Virological.org provides researchers with updates across more open-access platforms such as BioRxiv and NIH’s genetic sequence database GenBank. Dr. Bedford states “getting to a 3-6 day turnaround opens up huge new avenues in epidemiology” referring to the rapid collaboration available on these open-access platforms.

In response to this progression in the open science community, Christian Drosten, a virologist from the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, dispels overinterpretations of information from GISAID on Science Magazine, specifically concerning the strains of viruses sequenced from different regions globally. As a virus spreads, it is natural that some mutations will occur during replication of the virus. Such replication can happen when the virus is transmitted between individuals. He hedges his claims of certain sequencing data by suggesting that between two global communities (e.g. Munich and Bavaria) “[similar mutated strain types on GISAID are] not sufficient to claim a link” between viral spread between two communities. Drosten highlights a big issue with the open science movement—a fast spread of information can be grossly misinterpreted by other scientists. A slight miscommunication in a rapidly moving field can lead to amplification of biases in data. Therefore, it is important to recognize the problems that can also arise and spread through open science platforms that may lead to public misinformation without a filter of scholarly peer-reviewing.

The current scientific narrative behind COVID posits concern and fear. By reframing the scientific narrative, current trends reveal a new narrative on influential communication, rapid responses, and a push for rigorous genomic data. Beyond the media attention garnered by the virus, it is vital to consider the lasting impact COVID-19 may have on our behaviors within the scientific community to shape how the public engages with scientists. As a graduate student at Johns Hopkins Medical School, I can begin to see an increase in collaboration among young scientists through online teaching and communication platforms. The evolution of how my department approaches literature reviews, to which academic journals investigators choose to submit their work, and how graduate students obtain a literature background during rotations will be shaped by the change in the science community’s behavior prompted by COVID-19.