How we are supporting research dealing with COVID-19
The spread of the COVID-19 virus has presented unparalleled challenges for academia and research. Here's how we are supporting research during this pandemic.
As universities across the UK and the world have halted teaching activities, closed campuses and moved to online forms of working, individuals have had to make major changes.
Rest assured that we are continuing to provide a range of services to support members working in research. This includes the Janet Network, the UK’s only dedicated research and education network that interconnects with other global research and education networks.
Open access services
Our open access services also continue as normal but are proving pivotal in this time of crisis. These include:
- CORE, which provides unrestricted access to millions of research papers from around the world
- Sherpa, which helps authors and institutions make informed and confident decisions in open access publications
- Compliance and discovery services like Zetoc, which enable researchers to keep pace with their peers and stay up-to-date with new research by searching over 52 million journal and conference papers and set up alerts on British Library data, library hub discover and Archives Hub
Responding to the current pandemic we’ve put additional support in place.
Help for collaborative COVID-19 research
We're prioritising e-infrastructure support for national and international collaborative research initiatives and have delivered enhanced connectivity to several COVID-19 research projects. Please get in touch if you would like to discuss how we can support your organisation too.
Access to publisher content
We’ve produced a list of publishers and content providers who are widening access to their resources. This includes access to specific COVID-19 research.
Free access to content services
Until 31 July 2020, non-subscribing members will have free access to:
- Historical Texts - providing access to over 400,000 texts from four key collections, dating from the late 15th century to the First World War, including the UK medical heritage library
- Journal Archives - providing access to over 600 journal backfiles from eight publishers' archives including ProQuest, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Taylor and Francis
Demonstrating the value and impact of making scholarly content open access
Our IRUS-UK service provides information about usage (downloads) of open access scholarly content in institutional repositories.
Usage stats conform to the COUNTER standard, enabling the review of usage across a range of repositories using a comparable unit of measurement.
The service highlights that some research papers are attracting significant usage on a daily basis. For example, a paper on coronavirus authored by N. Ferguson at Imperial College London has had 100,000+ downloads since publication on 17 March 2020.
Future research environments
It’s clear that the current challenges will have knock-on effects for academic research going forward, especially in the area of technology.
We’re working with independent think-tank Demos on a report which will asses the impact of industry 4.0 technologies on the future of research.
An interim report was published in October 2019 and the final report will follow in June.
Working with other bodies
Following on from the Demos report, we will be working with a range of research organisations including - Research England, Universities Scotland, the British Academy and Royal Academy of Engineers - to determine a vision for future research environments and understand the capabilities required to reach that vision.
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