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Sharing the news about Wellcome Open Research, a partner platform, and their new collection, which has been created to prioritise, expedite and openly publish the latest COVID-19 research developments from Wellcome-funded researchers.

A new collection on Wellcome Open Research has been created to prioritise, expedite and openly publish the latest COVID-19 research developments from Wellcome-funded researchers.

In this unprecedented event, funders, publishers and the broader research community have joined in committing to ensure that research findings relevant to COVID-19 pandemic are made open access and freely available as quickly as possible. Immediate access to robust and rigorous science is essential for informing clinical and public health responses in real time.

Wellcome is supporting many new collaborative research projects to tackle the virus, such as the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator and the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium, as well as supporting an initiative through which  publishers have pledged to make all of their COVID-19 and coronavirus-related publications, and supporting data, immediately accessible in PubMed Central (PMC) and other public repositories. The Wellcome Open Research platform enables the researchers we fund to rapidly and openly share their research, in full alignment with its expectations for research relevant to COVID-19 and other public health emergencies.

This new collection aggregates and showcases all COVID-19 related research articles published on the Wellcome Open Research platform and provides full access to the underlying data and expert peer review, thus allowing others to reuse, build-upon, learn and further support the global efforts to tackle this pressing public health emergency.

Importantly, readers can stay up to date by using the tracking function which alerts readers to all new articles added to collection, as well as updates to peer review reports, author responses, public comments and the publication of any updated versions. 

Robert Kiley, Head of Open Research at Wellcome, said: ‘Wellcome Open Research provides Wellcome-funded researchers with a platform where they can share their research findings quickly and openly, provide access to all underlying data and code, and update their submissions in light of peer review reports, all of which are published openly and transparently. Now more than ever, this publishing model is needed to ensure the broad and rapid sharing of data and research findings to help tackle this public health emergency.”

The collection launches with 6 articles and contains newly published research from the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London, the UCL Public Health Data Science Research Group, the Infectious Diseases Data Observatory (IDDO) and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) amongst others.

One of the first articles published in this collection, by Sam Abbott and the Centre for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases (LSHTM), modelled the transmission dynamics at the outset of the outbreak in Wuhan, China. They used a reproducible framework and released all their code as open source to increase knowledge sharing across response teams, to enable others to repeat the analysis as more data is collected. One of the peer review reports praised the author for adding reporting delays to the simulated case counts.

One study included in the collection is by Dr Robert Aldridge and colleagues from the University College London, who found that that levels of infection from three common coronaviruses appear to have followed a seasonal pattern in England, with peaks occurring during winter and broadly at the same time as influenza.

Of using Wellcome Open Research to publish this article, Dr Robert Aldridge said:

“As a Wellcome-funded academic currently undertaking research on COVID-19, it’s crucial that we rapidly share our results along with the underlying data and analytical code to inform the public health response in a timely and appropriate manner. Wellcome Open Research’s commitment to rapid publication, transparent peer review and editorial guidance on making all source data openly available has been invaluable in this process, and it’s for this reason that we submitted our paper examining seasonality and immunity to common coronavirus infections from the Flu Watch cohort to the journal, alongside all data and analytical code.”

The COVID-19 collection welcomes all types of publications related to coronavirus, including but not limited to: clinical trials, clinical case reports, epidemiological modelling, transmission dynamics, collaboratively written policies, protocols, and any other information that needs to be shared rapidly.

We also recognise that as well as COVID-19 research being shared, there is the need for rapid, expert peer review to validate and improve the work. If you would like to openly contribute expert review to the research published in this collection, please contact us at info@wellcomeopenresearch.org.

We encourage our researchers to submit their COVID-19 research to this collection, and if you have any other ideas or requests on how Wellcome Open Research can help disseminate your work please get in touch with us; we are here to help.