The IUPUI campus sits near the center of Indianapolis, the state capitol of Indiana. Along with one of the largest medical schools in the United States, three hospitals, and more than 140 health-related majors and degrees, IUPUI emphasizes service-learning, community-engaged research, and public scholarship. It makes sense, therefore, that when public health emergencies arrive, IUPUI will be at the center of the effort to make a difference for the people of Indiana. One part of making a difference for the health of Indiana's residents is ensuring that research findings are readily available and accessible to all. The COVID-19 pandemic threatens the health and well-being of people everywhere; thus, any effort to address it will prioritize the sharing of information without paywalls.
Happily, IUPUI is one of many research organizations, publishers, and universities to join the Wellcome Trust in affirming the World Health Organization's 2016 “Statement on data sharing in public health emergencies.” As a signatory of the Wellcome Trust commitment to "Sharing research data and findings relevant to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak," IUPUI seeks to ensure that its COVID-related research publications, data, preprints, and public health information are openly accessible to researchers, policymakers, and readers everywhere.
At IUPUI University Library, we're excited and honored to support our researchers' efforts to make COVID-related scholarship and information freely available to all. We’re leveraging our existing open access services to help campus researchers find the best paths to sharing in alignment with the Wellcome Trust commitment and many other open-COVID pledges. We know that during this ongoing emergency, researchers need to focus on COVID-19 research and not on the minutiae of how to make information free. For that reason we have focussed initial efforts on a “hands-free” (for authors) approach to open archiving for IUPUI’s COVID-related literature. Working under the rights retained in the IUPUI Open Access Policy, we’re openly archiving as much of our researchers’ science as possible in IUPUI ScholarWorks. We expect to include more than 225 articles and other works in the Open Access Coronavirus-Related Works collection within the next few days. At the same time, we know that this will not be the last pandemic to hit Indiana. For that reason, we’re beginning efforts to create a digital archive of IUPUI’s COVID-related websites and web-based information using the Archive-It tool. Given that public health information sharing is largely digital, we hope that creating this archive will prove to be as valuable to future researchers as the physical collections of records pertaining to the 1918 pandemic are today.
In addition to these new, “hands-free” services, our existing open access services are alive and well and ready to assist any IUPUI researcher in their efforts to honor this commitment to sharing research information and data to address the COVID-19 pandemic. These include:
Data Management: get a consult for best practices in data sharing
Journal Publishing: launch a new, open, peer reviewed journal
Open Access Publishing Funds: help your student authors and co-authors publish in eligible, for-fee OA journals
Open Education: save your students the costs of expensive online textbooks
Metrics Support: explore strategies for measuring the impact of your COVID-research and community-focussed dissemination
Need help? Get in touch with the IUPUI University Library Center for Digital Scholarship: digschol@iupui.edu