Publishing during pandemic: Innovation, collaboration, and change - Smart - 2020 - Learned Publishing - Wiley Online Library

"Following the call from the Wellcome Trust back in January, many (if not most) publishers responded positively by making relevant content available for researchers. Subscription publishers, such as Springer Nature, made all articles related to COVID‐19 free to view. Others, like Emerald, made funds available to cover the APCs of topical articles which their open access journals chose to publish. EDP sciences and Berghahn Journals made all their content freely available – not just articles relating to the pandemic but their entire portfolios (where they had permission) in order to support researchers working from home without on‐campus access to their institutional holdings. In China, the Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) provided free access to COVID‐19 resources, including research papers that had English abstracts.

Cross‐publisher initiatives were also a positive outcome in the recent months. For example, with the agreement of several publishers, ReadCube launched a programme to facilitate free access to research on COVID‐19 for researchers, journalists, health workers, and others. Upon registration users can gain access to publications from various publishers, including Springer Nature, JAMA, and Wiley.

And many other organizations also provided support where they could, for example, Kudos provided free access to its premium service, Kudos Pro, which received over 5,000 sign‐ups. Publishing platforms also had to deal with variable workloads, such as HighWire reporting a sevenfold surge in the use of its systems (largely driven by the hosting of MedRxiv and BioRxiv, with some articles receiving over 4 million page views). For many organizations, this meant meeting unprecedented demand alongside staff needing to work remotely while maintaining contact with colleagues and systems...."