An Open-Publishing Response to the COVID-19 Infodemic
Halie M. Rando, Simina M. Boca, Lucy D'Agostino McGowan, Daniel S., Himmelstein, Michael P. Robson, Vincent Rubinetti, Ryan Velazquez, COVID-19, Review Consortium, Casey S. Greene, Anthony Gitter

TL;DR
This paper demonstrates how open online publishing using Manubot enabled a large, multidisciplinary team to collaboratively review and synthesize over 1,500 COVID-19 sources rapidly and transparently during the pandemic.
Contribution
It introduces a scalable, automated open publishing workflow for real-time scientific collaboration and dissemination during a global health crisis.
Findings
Organized over 50 scientists across disciplines.
Evaluated more than 1,500 sources.
Produced seven comprehensive literature reviews.
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed the rapid dissemination of papers and preprints investigating the disease and its associated virus, SARS-CoV-2. The multifaceted nature of COVID-19 demands a multidisciplinary approach, but the urgency of the crisis combined with the need for social distancing measures present unique challenges to collaborative science. We applied a massive online open publishing approach to this problem using Manubot. Through GitHub, collaborators summarized and critiqued COVID-19 literature, creating a review manuscript. Manubot automatically compiled citation information for referenced preprints, journal publications, websites, and clinical trials. Continuous integration workflows retrieved up-to-date data from online sources nightly, regenerating some of the manuscript's figures and statistics. Manubot rendered the manuscript into PDF, HTML, LaTeX, and DOCX outputs,…
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Taxonomy
TopicsScientific Computing and Data Management · Academic Publishing and Open Access · Misinformation and Its Impacts
