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COVID research is free to access — but for how long?

Scientific papers made free to access during the pandemic are rumoured to be disappearing behind paywalls. They aren’t — yet.
  1. Richard Van Noorden
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At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientific journals rushed to make related research free to read — temporarily, at least. Work on the disease or the virus SARS-CoV-2 would be free “at least for the duration of the outbreak”, publishers of subscription journals declared in a statement issued on 31 January 2020, the day after the World Health Organization declared the new coronavirus outbreak a ‘public-health emergency of international concern’, or PHEIC.

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Nature 611, 23 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-03418-9

References

  1. Chiarelli, A. et al. Preprint at Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7003684 (2022).

  2. Barbour, V. Front. Res. Metr. Anal. 6, 767869 (2022).

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