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of the version of record: ‘We saw a real acceleration in a lot of the open access movement in the industry. We worked really closely with a lot of clients to lower paywalls when people who were reading their content were going off-campus, and we worked closely with Oxford University Press to deposit in PubMed Central all of their relevant research as part of the Public Health Emergency Covid-19 Initiative. ‘Once some of the dust was starting to clear with those paywalls down, and with those workflows set-up to get the content downstream, we started working really closely with clients to make sure we are continuing to connect with those previous subscribers, how are we getting them the metrics they need to underline the value of the subscription when we need to put the paywalls back up. It was a true time for partnership, that we realised we needed to support with quick pivots, with these shifting business models, and different thoughts about on-campus and off- campus access.’ At the same time there was an urgency


to the sharing of preprints, and the data associated with the coronavirus, by researchers. As Hahnel noted: ‘There was suddenly this global urgency that we all need to be working together. People studying infectious diseases were already working together, but there was a massive gear switch in terms of making preprints available on bioRxiv,


6 Research Information December 2021/January 2022


“[Publishers] will inevitably want to learn from the longer-term ongoing and inevitable trend towards open science”


or platforms like Figshare. People also started using Figshare to store different countries’ national statistics because some countries didn’t have particularly solid web sites, they had web sites going up and down.’ The push for open data wasn’t limited


to the sharing of Covid-19 data, but as lockdowns were implemented and researchers had more time at their computers and away from the lab, they started having the opportunity to make other data available, and make use of other people’s data. As Hahnel pointed out: ‘There’s two


levels of usage of Figshare: there’s how many people are publishing content through Figshare, and how many people are downloading, and reusing content available on Figshare. There was a huge peak in the amount of submissions in March 2020, and a little peak again in September, but since then it’s just


resumed its normal upward trend. ‘The bigger story was the idea that people were making use of content after being forced out of the lab. We do ‘The State of Open’ survey every year (it will be coming out by the end of the year), and one of the things we’ve seen is that a lot more people in this year’s survey have used other people’s data. I’d assume that is because they were forced to. ‘If your full-time job is a wet lab scientist,


and you can’t do wet lab science, then your career progression is on hold unless you can publish more papers, and so you go and find lots of data. When asked where they get the data to pull together, the primary location was data repositories, to do a reanalysis or a cumulative bit of work across many different data sets.’ While open access and open data undoubtedly received a lot of attention, Heckner also noted that other parts of the push to greater openness have done less well, or been ‘paused’, things like the openness of supporting and thinking about the incentive structure. This is a point that ties into the theme of this year’s Open Access Week (www. openaccessweek.org): ‘It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity’. While it is easy to focus on the number of papers or amount of data that is being made available, it is important that we don’t ignore the issue of equity during the pandemic. Equity is about ensuring fair and impartial access to the whole of


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