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.