Op/Ed: COVID-19 is Reshaping the World of Bioscience Publishing

From an Op/Ed Published on Stat by Jeffrey S. Flier, M.D., Professor of Medicine At Harvard Medical School And Was Dean Of The School From 2007 to 2016.

From the Op/Ed:

The Covid-19 pandemic is rapidly changing our lives in previously unimaginable ways and forcing us to view many behaviors in a new light. That is certainly the case for bioscience publishing, which has already undergone significant change in the digital era.

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Even the most elite peer-reviewed journals in the bioscience publishing world are modifying their approach in response to the pandemic. The New England Journal of Medicine, for example, is making all of the material it publishes on Covid-19 open access on the web (everything else is behind a subscription paywall), and putting this content in one place on NEJM’s high-traffic website. Its first original article on the novel coronavirus, now called SARS-CoV-2, was published on January 29, a paper by Chinese scientists on early transmission dynamics of the virus. From then until March 18, the journal published four original articles, six perspective opinion pieces, two editorials, and eight short correspondences. Some of these were landmark papers in the field.

NEJM has even started a podcast, featuring editor-in-chief Eric Rubin and deputy editor Lindsey Baden, both specialists in infectious disease, an outreach that would have been unimaginable for the New England Journal of Medicine I grew up with.

Read the Complete Post (approx. 1170 words)

Filed under: Journal Articles, News, Open Access, Podcasts, Publishing