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How coronavirus is reshaping communication of scientists worldwide?

XINHUA

發布於 2020年02月28日11:34

Staff members do nucleic acid testing work at a novel coronavirus detection lab in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, Feb. 22, 2020. (Xinhua/Cheng Min)

*"It feels like things are transitioning to a completely new culture of doing research," says Isabella Eckerle, virologist of the Geneva Center for Emerging Viral Diseases. *

"It's exciting."

BEIJING, Feb. 28 (Xinhua) -- It has become a global fight as COVID-19 is spreading in more countries at a faster speed. Scientists around the world are using a different way of communication to ensure rapid sharing of information and speed up research.

Dave O'Connor and Tom Friedrich, both scientists from the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, invited several dozen colleagues around the United States to join a new workspace on the instant messaging platform Slack in late January, according to Science Magazine, the peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

After learning the news about the novel coronavirus in China, they realized that researchers would need a primate model if they were going to answer some key questions about its biology, read an article published Wednesday on the website of Science Magazine.

"We put out a call to a bunch of investigators and basically said: 'Hey, let's talk,'" O'Connor said, according to Science Magazine, one of the world's top academic journals. The idea is to coordinate research and make sure results are comparable, Friedrich added.

This is just one example of how the COVID-19 outbreak is transforming how scientists communicate about fast-moving health crises. A torrent of data is being released daily by preprint servers that did not exist a decade ago, then dissected on platforms such as Slack and Twitter, and in the media, before formal peer review begins.

"This is a very different experience from any outbreak that I've been a part of," the report quoted epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health as saying.

The intense communication has catalyzed an unusual level of collaboration among scientists that, combined with scientific advances, has enabled research to move faster than during any previous outbreak.

 A researcher works in a laboratory in Beijing Health-Biotech Group in Beijing, capital of China, Feb. 14, 2020. (Xinhua/Zhang Yuwei)

Sluggish scientific communication has often been a problem during previous outbreaks. One of the reasons was the fear that competitors might steal their findings. Researchers sometimes sat on crucial data until a paper was accepted by a high-profiled, peer-reviewed journal, according to the report.

Even if researchers were willing to share their findings early, there was not a platform to do so.

Lipsitch realized a few years ago that preprint servers, which publish endings prior to peer review, could change that. Scientists could post fresh data rapidly and still get some credit.

In a 2018 paper, he and others concluded that preprints sped up data dissemination during the 2015-16 Zika epidemic and the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

Most of the preprints appeared more than 100 days before a journal published the work. But overall, less than 5 percent of the journal articles about the two epidemics were first posted as a preprint.

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (C), World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General, addresses a press conference, on which WHO said that China's latest epidemiological paper on COVID-19 is important in enabling it to provide advice to other countries, in Geneva, Switzerland, Feb. 17, 2020. (Xinhua/Chen Junxia)

The COVID-19 outbreak has broken that mold. More than 283 papers had already appeared on preprint repositories, compared with 261 published in journals as of Feb. 21, Science Magazine reported.

But some researches are worried that the data may become part of an "infodemic" of bad information.

A 31 January preprint on bioRxiv by scientists in India pointed to "uncanny" similarities between SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and HIV, fueling conspiracy theories about genetic engineering.

The paper was widely discussed on Twitter and covered by some news outlets even though some scientists immediately said it was flawed. The paper received 90 critical comments within 48 hours and was swiftly retracted.

Still, the benefits of rapid information sharing far outweigh the disadvantages, said Jeremy Farrar, a British medical researcher.

Moreover, even publication by a top journal is not a guarantee that a claim is correct, he added.

It is not clear whether such scientific collaborations will help mitigate the worldwide blow from COVID-19. But many scientists welcome the change of communication. "It feels like things are transitioning to a completely new culture of doing research," says Isabella Eckerle, virologist of the Geneva Center for Emerging Viral Diseases. "It's exciting."

At the same time, it is also noticeable that, with a highly responsible attitude, China has conducted active international cooperation since the outbreak. It has immediately informed the World Health Organization (WHO) of the outbreak, shared technical information and the full gene sequence of the novel coronavirus with the WHO, and provided assistance to foreign nationals in China.  ■

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