The Scholarly Publishing Community and Research Organizations Respond to the Monkeypox Public Health Emergency

Monkeypox is a public health emergency both globally and here in the United States.

As part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s response to this global health threat, the White Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) coordinated an international effort to make research results and data related to monkeypox immediately available to the public. To date, science and technology leaders and advisors representing more than 20 allies and partners have participated in this effort, which also has support from science organizations including the African Academy of Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and the U.S. National Academy of Medicine.

Immediate public access to research and results accelerates scientific discovery, and ensures all stakeholders have access to the knowledge and resources needed to respond to the crisis. 

OSTP is pleased to report on the efforts taken thus far by the scholarly publishing community and research organizations to share information related to monkeypox. These efforts include that:

• Springer Nature, with a catalog of more than 3,000 journals worldwide, is making all monkeypox related content free to access.

• Elsevier, with a catalog of more than 2,700 journals worldwide, has established an online monkeypox research and health hub and is making all monkeypox-related health, medical, and biomedical science articles free to access.

• Several publishers have also committed to providing free access to monkeypox-related articles in their journals, including Cell, The Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, and Science.

In addition, U.S. federal departments and agencies are responding to the public health emergency by providing scholarly publishing resources to share results and data:

• The National Library of Medicine, the world’s largest biomedical library, will work with publishers that submit to PubMed Central to facilitate making the wide range of journal articles that can inform the monkeypox response freely available to the public.

• The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s PubAg and the National Science Foundation’s Public Access Repository can accession publications on monkeypox resulting from research funded by their respective agencies.

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has launched a new monkeypox response page.

• The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has summarized information on monkeypox for the general public.

Important contributions to the scientific knowledge-base are produced by researchers across the world. Scholars everywhere can amplify their cutting-edge research for feedback ahead of publishing through the submission of their manuscripts to pre-print repositories. These repositories provide researchers with the ability to share their work for early feedback with a wide audience, often before formal peer-review.

• Freely accessible online pre-print repositories are available for specific research fields, such bioRxiv for biology and SocArXiv for sociology, as well as for multiple research fields, such as AfricArXiv for all research originating in African countries and arXiv for quantitative biology, physics, computer science, statistics, electrical engineering, and the social sciences.

• Accelerating Science and Publication in Biology (ASAPbio) has put together a comprehensive, easily searchable, database of pre-print repositories for public use.

• To learn more about pre-prints, the National Library of Medicine has developed a free online course.

Together, these efforts by the scholarly publishing community will accelerate scientific discovery and ultimately save lives.

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