13 weeks in a pandemic: a descriptive study of Imperial College London’s COVID-19 publications.

Abstract

In a 13 week period, 41 outputs were published from a range of Imperial authors. From the groups of outputs defined: output type (Report, Preprint, Published Article, Code); non-peer reviewed and peer reviewed and open access status (CC-BY Gold, free access) a pattern can be seen. Between Week 1 – Week 5 the outputs were entirely Reports published CC-BY. As Reports continued to be released, they were joined by Preprints in Week 6 – Week 8, also published either Gold CC-BY or under a specific preprint server licence permitting free access. From Week 9, Published Articles in journals began to appear with a mix of Gold OA outputs and introducing free access to the set. In Week 12, Code emerges for the first time as an output. From the introduction of Preprints in Week 6 and Published Articles in Week 9 we can also see the types of articles being produced; Research outputs in the form of Preprints being first seen, followed by further Research and Editorial content following in Published Articles. Later in Week 12 we see the first emergence of ‘Other’ article types – clinical guidelines and clinical education outputs. The open access status of outputs seems largely linked to their output type. 100% of the outputs were freely available at the time of writing, but 29% (12 outputs) of them were not published with licenses that guarantee this in perpetuity. This 29% are all Published Articles in subscription journals that the publisher has made free to read. There are no reuse rights associated with this. All of the rest of the outputs- Reports, Preprints and Code are open access either by a CC-BY licence or the preprint server’s licence to host the article. Of the platforms disseminating these outputs, 34% are published by Imperial’s repository Spiral, with a following 27% published by other repositories and preprint servers. The remaining 39% are published by journal publishers, with Elsevier being the most frequent publisher of journals in this set.