UCL COVID-19 Collection—An interactive showcase of COVID-19 related research from the University College London

UCL COVID-19 Collection benefits authors, publishers, and users

The global pandemic has elicited a resounding response from the academic community in terms of research regarding the novel coronavirus disease. From the onset, ScienceOpen has been working with publishers and researchers to create COVID-19 resources that help organize the massive amount of research being published.  

Our most recent COVID-19 Collection has been created with the University College London library where we have made a collection indexing all UCL research related to the COVID-19 pandemic. This collection is automatically updated by pulling in records from the institutional repository UCL Discovery and affiliation metadata from records aggregated by the ScienceOpen platform. The automated setup easily manages the stream of new COVID-19 material being published and opens it up for exploration and interaction. In just the last week, there were 35 new publications added to the collection. Additional benefits of having all of the UCL published research relating to COVID-19 in one place is that it gives users easy and flexible tools for search and discovery such as changing the sort order from number of citations, Altmetric^TM score or date. Users searching the contents of the collection, can narrow the number of articles in the collection by specific journals, publishers, or overlapping collections on the ScienceOpen platform. Thus, a user would be able to see publications that also appear in the Wiley: Novel Coronavirus COVID-19 and or in the UCL Press special issue Special series on COVID-19 interactions with our Environment collections.  This encourages users to browse the content and supports easy discovery of related research. Follow the UCL COVID-19 Collection for updates on new content or interactions! 

Further features and details of the UCL COVID-19 Collection

The UCL COVID-19 collection opens up academic research to a wider audience and the ScienceOpen platform provides opportunities for interaction with the community such as one click sharing to social media channels like Twitter and Facebook but also the Chinese platform Sina Weibo. From a quick “recommend” button to comments, full post-publication peer review, author lay summaries and more, ScienceOpen has a range of interactive tools. Transparent metrics for collections, articles and authors additionally provide ways to analyze and assess the research output.  

ScienceOpen collections help highlight COVID-19 research

The UCL COVID-19 collection joins other coronavirus resources on ScienceOpen that are available to publishers and institutes, free of charge. The collection “Coronaviruses, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2” has aggregated over 31,000 articles to date and highlights a range of research perspectives including the European Respiratory Society, the American Chemical Society, the Institute of Physics and the Microbiology Society and many others. ScienceOpen has worked with a diverse group of collaborators to contribute to the research combatting the pandemic. The UCL Covid-19 collection is a great example of the opportunities ScienceOpen’s platform affords to institutes and publishers to help showcase their research in the midst of an overwhelming amount of coronavirus research.  

If you are a memeber of an institute, research group or a publisher that would be interested in creating similar projects with ScienceOpen, please reach out to Stephanie Dawson, and we can get started to make it happen.