Why open science is critical to combatting COVID-19

In the current global emergency, scientific discovery has evolved much more rapidly than before. The full genome of COVID-19 was published barely a month after the first patient was admitted into Wuhan hospital, as an open-access publication in The Lancet. This is to be compared with a five-month delay in the case of SARS outbreak in 2002-03, a large part of this delay being due to an information blackout in the first months of the SARS epidemic.

Lessons from previous outbreaks have underscored the importance of sharing data and publications in order to combat the disease.