Elsevier's continued negligence and inaction is costing scientists time in an urgent race to save lives.
Urgent scientific releases on COVID-19 published in the Journal of Infection remain paywalled on Elsevier's ScienceDirect. Elsevier must allow COVID-19 science to be shared freely with the world immediately upon release. Paywalls and embargoes will not be allowed to obstruct the scientific community during the crisis.
Promisingly, Elsevier and 1Science released a collection of 27,124 scholarly coronavirus articles, including 4,097 of their own articles.
The release brings Elsevier's commitment to just over 50% open access to its catalog of research and review articles containing reference to the coronaviruses. Elsevier's Director of Communications Christopher Capot personally responded to your call and reached out again to give us the news. Elsevier also unlocked our banner article on wet markets and included it on their Coronavirus Information Center.
How can publishers help scientists?
We hope this means Elsevier and other publishers are committing to unlock further keywords in virology, zoonotic hosts, treatment for pneumonia, and more. The threat of COVID-19 continues to spread globally -- the threat of paywalls obstructing COVID-19 science is too great to take.