Update 29/05/2020: a printed version of the Science story is now out

A couple of weeks ago we uploaded along with Daniel Torres-Salinas and Pedro A. Castillo-Valdivieso, from the University of Granada a preprint in which we modeled the publication growth and social media attention to COVID-19 papers to make predictions. A specific aspects we considered was the distinction between OA and non-OA publications. This is a work in progress and we hope to deliver some more solid results in the future.

However, we were (happily) surprised to be approached by a Jeffrey Brainard, journalist for Science Magazine who has covered our work in a recent news story. The story, entitled ‘Scientists are drowning in COVID-19 papers. Can new tools keep them afloat?‘ discusses the challenges on scientific communication that the coronavirus outbreak and the massive scientific response to it have presented. Dealing with an exponential growth of literature which threatens scientists’ capabilities to keep track on new developments.

>23,000 scientific papers about #COVID19 in 4+ months, and counting. Which ones to read? How to make sense of it all? #kaggle #AI #datascience #peerreview #sciencepublishing @NewsfromScience https://t.co/As3kA8wrtd

— Jeffrey Brainard (@JeffreyBrainard) May 13, 2020

These challenges have to do, not only with keeping track, but also identifying the corpus of literature related with the virus, with several corpuses already available. It also means dealing with both, peer and non-peer reviewed literature, added to the celerity of the whole race for identifying vaccines and treatments, which are leading to issues regarding misinformation and misunderstanding between what is an open and public scientific debate, and informing the general public.