The circle is expanding around the world: open access against pandemic

Abstract

The article describes some meaningful initiatives brought about in the latest months aiming at sharing open access resources to support research dissemination and to speed up the discovery of a treatment. This is not about a ‘task force’ created on the spur of the Covid crisis: the reliability of the open access model was built in 30 years’ continued engagement. Open access scholarly communication happens in real time, shared at global level, transparent, trustworthy. On these qualities is based the hope for an answer to the pandemic. At the same time, these characteristics will foster knowledge sharing when the emergency is over. Making resources available on open access on the web should not be limited to the current crisis, but should be the very pivot of open science. In addition, the article describes a real case: medRxiv, the first biomedical repository based on preprints, launched in 2019 and now on the front line for an effective treatment.