Welcome to the Covid-19 workspace!
We have created this public workspace for researchers working on coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and its disease, COVID-19. Researchers may reference these materials and contribute to them for others to build upon and cite their contributions.
Supporting research during a global crisis:
Like most other infotech and research platforms, we are focusing on how best to contribute to the ongoing work around COVID-19. Accordingly, we are expanding our coverage of this research and have introduced this public project seeded with records that we and our users will add to continually as an open resource for colleagues working on this virus.
At a time when so many are offering resources and support to deal with today’s challenge, we are pleased to make this registry for unpublished research of all disciplines openly accessible to those so dedicated to discovering therapies and vaccines for COVID-19.
We are actively collecting open access research artifacts relating to COVID-19 and uploading them into a public research project. Our aim is to contribute to COVID-19 research by seeding this project with findings from trusted sources (eg, bioRxiv, CZI, medRxiv, and PMC, among others1) so more information becomes accessible and usable as the community participates.
We’re all in this together:
This project is available for anyone to access. We encourage researchers to share their own research findings in this vitally important area so others may learn from and build upon your work. We welcome all types of files relating to COVID-19 research, including but not limited to preprints, datasets, images, and any other digital work products.
If you’re new to ARTiFACTS, you can find out how ARTiFACTS works and how your provenance for each research artifact is secured for published and pre-published work2.
Need help getting started? Check out this demo from our VP of Product, Jason. If you need any support, please contact support@artifacts.ai and we’ll get back to you asap.
A bigger picture beyond the immediate challenges:
As science and our world get beyond the immediate crisis, which we will, there is also a broader perspective to address here. The nature of this disease has brought out the better angels of our nature. Researchers have actively and openly shared their latest findings on preprint servers and data repositories, so their learnings enable science to overtake the spread of the virus.
And it comes as no surprise to any scientist working on this, their primary resources are pre-published works that have not undergone peer review. While that formal process is necessary for methodically and formally establishing the body of our understanding, the “first responders” of science are doing what they do best which is getting their works out immediately to the ultimate benefit of society.
Although the COVID-19 challenges are current and global, virtually all research disciplines create vast troves of knowledge that are unpublished, much of which remains as such. When we get beyond the immediacy of this challenge, we all will have an opportunity to devote more attention to and resources on exposing that knowledge for the benefit of society. Fulfilling this objective is and will remain at the heart of the ARTiFACTS vision.
A post-script:
While nomenclature is important in science, we leave it to the scientific community to manage their taxonomies. With respect to this virus and its associated disease, naming conventions and the media’s rapid uptake of the subject may have created some opportunity for conflating these. As of this writing, our understanding is SARS-CoV-2 is the Genbank name for the virus, which has also been referred to as 2019-nCOV. The World Health Organization has named the disease COVID-19, which is caused by the virus. We point this out to alert those not already familiar with the terms and their technical distinctions and because these are of practical value when searching any research information service.
You will find the following resources with these url’s:
1 bioRxiv at https://www.biorxiv.org/, CZI at https://chanzuckerberg.com/, medRxiv at https://www.medrxiv.org/, PMC at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/
2 http://artifacts.ai/how-it-works/
Additional research and data resources: Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/cases-in-us.html
Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Cases Data https://data.humdata.org/dataset/novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov-cases
Links to COVID-19 Data Resources http://www.copyright.com/coronavirus-covid-19-data/
To learn more, visit us at artifacts.ai and follow us on Twitter @ARTiFACTS_ai.
Contact Emma Boswood, Director or Community
Engagement, emma@artifacts.ai.