By Lisa Cuevas Shaw

One of the primary sources of tension for leaders and society at large during this global pandemic has been the dizzying flow of information, misinformation, and disinformation (Pazzanese, 2020). In fact, the proliferation of misinformation emerged as a central narrative, so much so that the World Health Organization (WHO) referred to the phenomenon as an infodemic (United Nations, 2020). How can business leaders productively process the sheer volume and pace of information sharing, let alone parse out good science from bad? More significant still, how will they proactively support society in making sense of critical, possibly life-saving, information? As a start, we can look at how the science community responded to this crisis. Their collective action to accelerate the open sharing and processing of COVID-19-related research and data on a global scale offers significant implications regarding the information sector’s future role and system for serving the needs of society in times of crisis.

During the early days of the pandemic, no one was in the hot seat more than the global science community—public health officials, in particular. An analysis of Twitter feeds, press releases, and news reports verify that we received new and conflicting information among different members of the media, government, science, and health communities nearly every day as we tried to understand how to effectively combat disease spread (Kouzy et al., 2020). Despite the myriad challenges to securing answers, one phenomenon clearly emerged from the broader science community that merits our attention. Publishers, societies, and related business members temporarily unlocked paywalls to content; encouraged rapid, responsible data-sharing; aggregated content for ease in discovery; translated science communication into practical insights; and rapidly formed new partnerships to mobilize and strengthen their efforts.

This open sharing of research and data emerged very early on in the pandemic. At the end of January, one of the leading advocates in the contemporary open science movement, the Wellcome Trust, distributed a press release publicly urging the scientific community—researchers, academic journals, and funders— to “ensure that research findings and data relevant to this outbreak are shared rapidly and openly to inform the public health response and help save lives” (Wellcome Trust, 2020). In rapid succession, leading publishers, societies, NGOs, IGOs, think tanks, and related media and businesses moved swiftly in February and onward to make research content freely accessible and discoverable.

These moves are no small matter when you consider how the broader information sector operates. Proprietary information, paid content models, and “scooping” news and insights make the business go ‘round. More specifically, those who know the scholarly communication world are aware of the ongoing tensions embedded in the open science movement. The research community generally agrees on the movement’s core principles of transparency, openness, collaboration, and wide dissemination of research in the interest of the public good. However, economic, political, and social constructs have prevented the harmonizing of various views around levels of openness. Yet, when faced with a public health crisis, business leaders across scholarly communication and the broader information sector have, with relative consistency, adjusted business models and practices that otherwise rely on a closed information-sharing system to ensure instead that they proactively serve the most pressing needs of society (NISO, 2020).

If the science community and broader information sector can adapt business models and practices to readily serve society during a pandemic, the question is, why not extend these open practices to solve other high-stakes societal problems, health-related or other? Is it time that we retool current business and collaboration models that favor privileged, closed access over collective access and processing of information? And how will we sustain these new models? These are active questions and conversations happening within the scholarly communication community that readily apply to the broader information sector as well. Let us not lose this opportunity to challenge the old guard of privileged access to critical information. A robust system for ensuring an informed society requires us to adopt and sustain new models for information sharing and processing, at scale.

References

Kouzy, R., Abi Jaoude, J., Kraitem, A., El Alam, M. B., Karam, B., Adib, E., Zarka, J., Traboulsi, C., Akl, E. W., & Baddour, K. 2020. Coronavirus Goes Viral: Quantifying the COVID-19 Misinformation Epidemic on Twitter. Cureus, 12(3), e7255. https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.7255

National Information Standards Organization. (March, 2020). COVID-19: Response from the Information Community [Resource Page]. NISO. https://www.niso.org/niso-io/2020/03/covid-19-response-information-community

Pazzanese, C. (May 8, 2020). Battling the ‘pandemic of misinformation.’ The Harvard Gazette. Harvard University.

United Nations, Department of Global Communications. 2020, March 28. UN Tackles “Infodemic” of Misinformation and Cybercrime in COVID-19 Crisis. United Nations.

Wellcome Trust. 2020, January 31. Sharing Research Data and Findings Relevant to the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Outbreak. [Press Release]. Retrieved from: https://wellcome.ac.uk/coronavirus-covid-19/open-data