Coronavirus and Cambridge: two years on
4 March 2022
Last update: 04/03/22 12:53
When The Global Pandemic started two years ago, Cambridge University Press was quick to react with a number of extraordinary initiatives that supported not only the goal to work towards eradicating the virus, but also our mission to advance learning, research and knowledge worldwide.
Early in 2020 the Press joined a Wellcome-coordinated COVID-19 statement, signed by over 30 publishers, which called for open or free access to all COVID-19 publications for the duration of the pandemic. Around the same time we also joined Public Health Emergency COVID-19 Initiative (nih.gov) to provide full text to PMC for all our coronavirus articles.
To help accelerate peer review of COVID-19 papers, a number of our journals joined the the COVID-19 Rapid Review Initiative, which worked on implementing the commitments made in the Wellcome-coordinated COVID-19 statement. To help further increase the speed with which papers could be published, the Accepted Manuscript workflow was adopted for Cambridge journals publishing coronavirus articles, with the aim being that we publish them within 24-48 hours of acceptance.
By far one of our most successful and highest impact initiatives was our Coronavirus Collection. In 2020 we made all covid-related articles open access and waived the relevant APC. As of 2021, articles in our subscription titles have been made free for at least one month after publication. There are now over 2000 articles in this collection, from across our journals portfolio.
This Coronavirus Collection shows the depth and breadth of our publishing and reflects the evolution of research during the pandemic from a purely biological, epidemiological and public health problem to highlighting how pandemic has affected all parts of society, from healthcare to mental health, to social and organizational infrastructure, to economics, welfare and policy.
At the start of the pandemic, there was a huge amount of interest on research on the efficacy of masks (1,2), how the virus became aerosolized, dispersed, deposited and inhaled (3), what we could learn from previous outbreaks (4), how technology could be used to help track the virus (5), and the start of how to design vaccines to defeat the virus (6).
More recently, some of our highly downloaded research papers have looked at what conspiratory beliefs feed into the coronavirus narrative and vaccine hesitancy (7,8,9), how organizations can and have responded to the pandemic (10), mental health, well-being and loneliness (11,12,13), and analysis of why some people refuse to wear masks (14).
Research on the virus has risen from disparate parts of academia, showing the need for multiple experts from divergent subject areas to work together to solve complex multifaceted problems.
Cambridge plays a global role in education and research and shares our University’s mission to contribute to society through our work. Our commitment to open research and its key tenets of rapid and transparent publication processes, plus open access publication of a wide range of research outputs play an important role in tackling shared threats such as this.
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Photo by Testalize.me on Unsplash
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