Frontiers | Openness, Integrity, Inclusion, and Innovation in Scholarly Communication: Competing or Complementary Forces? | Research Metrics and Analytics

"In 2020, the importance of open and rapid communication of academic research came to the fore, as possibly never before, in the global effort to address the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic arrived at a time when much of the infrastructure for sharing research openly and rapidly was already in place, and to a large extent, the global publishing enterprise was able to fulfill its function of dissemination of information.

However, we are already seeing signs that publishing may revert to a more closed model post pandemic. It is also clear that the pandemic has exacerbated some of the problems in scholarly communication, such as a worsening participation by women and unequal distribution of funding globally. Furthermore, it is not clear that some of the innovations developed in the pandemic for sharing of information—such as the CORD-19 dataset of publications—will endure in their current state. Finally, the sheer volume of publishing, especially through relatively novel mechanisms, such as preprints, has led to uncertainty about how to support trust in research publications, both in the academic community and in the wider public."