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As we relaunch the Disease Outbreaks Gateway on F1000Research, F1000’s James Barker highlights the existing strengths of the Gateway and what’s to come under its new, expanded scope.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the publication of disease outbreak research has exploded. From studies on the virus to statistical modeling of disease spread, and more recently,  clinical trials relating to therapeutics and vaccines – COVID-19 has resulted in a wide range of research outputs. On F1000Research, these have all been housed in our Disease Outbreaks Gateway. The influx of COVID-19 papers has caused content in the Gateway to more than double in just a year!

The Disease Outbreaks Gateway was created in 2018 to provide a venue for rapidly sharing information during an outbreak. Additionally, our strong open data policy supports both the transparency and reproducibility of this research. The Gateway was initially established in response to the Ebola and Zika outbreaks, but the COVID-19 pandemic has only further demonstrated the importance of open science, particularly during health emergencies.

Given the popularity of the Gateway, we want to ensure we can continue to provide a publication venue for the rapid dissemination of research coming out of the current pandemic and for outbreaks of the future.

What’s next for the Gateway?

The Gateway is a popular venue for research related to the pandemic from across the globe and across disciplines. With the success of the Gateway during the pandemic, you could take the approach of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” However, just as healthcare professionals are now analyzing how they responded to the pandemic and seeing what lessons can be learned, we have reviewed how the Gateway achieves its aims. So, following this review, what did we learn?

• Global authorship – Looking at the authorship of the Gateway, we could see our authors were from 78 countries across six continents.
• Multidisciplinary – The Gateway includes content from individual medical cases to compound discovery and disease modeling.
• Peaks and troughs – When looking at trends in submissions and publications, we can see spikes in submissions during active outbreaks, with these falling away once the outbreaks resolve.
• Reactive vs. proactive – We created publication venues for emerging and re-emerging diseases rather than having a pre-existing area that authors can submit to as an outbreak begins.

The review demonstrated the key strengths of the Gateway are its global and multidisciplinary authorship. However, we could also see that the Gateway has periods of inactivity outside of active outbreaks, with interest increasing only after adding new areas for ongoing outbreaks. Moving forward, we want to ensure that we can maintain the global authorship of the Gateway while providing a less reactive structure.

A change in focus

We have previously focused on specific diseases causing the outbreaks, but this structure has limited the Gateway’s scope.

Consequently, we are now shifting focus from the diseases to the regions where the outbreaks occur. Why? Firstly,  by shifting our focus to geographic areas, we can take advantage of our pre-existing global authorship while highlighting the geographic context of the research itself. Additionally, this allows us to establish a stable foundation that research on new outbreaks can easily feed into. Finally, we can ensure that diseases that may be emerging or re-emerging have a publication venue before they cause epidemics or pandemics.

So how will it work?

Our new regional focus mirrors the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office structure: a pre-existing grouping of nations worldwide with relevance to public health. Each regional office makes up a Gateway Area, with the addition of a Global Gateway Area for diseases that reach pandemic or global endemic status:

• Africa
• Americas
• Eastern Mediterranean
• Europe
• South-East Asia
• Western Pacific
• Global

Additionally, using the reporting of the WHO Regional Offices, we can track emerging public health emergencies in these regions.

‘Emerging’ is a key word here. Previously we have focused on specific diseases of current public health concern. Now, diseases that are emerging and re-emerging in these regions can be included and highlighted.

Final thoughts

In a previous blog, I described the issues surrounding Neglected Tropical Diseases and the ‘Big Three’ impact leading to a lack of funding and focus on NTDs. While it is important to highlight diseases with impending or immediate relevance to public health, we must ensure others are not ignored. By moving away from our focus on individual diseases to regions, we can ensure that we are providing a publishing venue for all research related to current, emerging, and previous disease outbreaks while including the geographical context.

The newly named Emerging Disease and Outbreaks Gateway is now live and open for submissions!

Want to get involved?  We will be recruiting two Advisors to each of the regional Gateway Areas to ensure we receive expert and contextual input on how to progress the Gateway.

If you are interested in becoming an Advisor or would like to recommend a colleague, then please do get in touch!