Open access to COVID-19 research resources

Free COVID-19 research resources from publisher database (as of 3rd April)

ProQuest

ProQuest just announced the launch of a Coronavirus Research Database in response to the rapidly growing need for authoritative content related to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). The new cross-disciplinary resource enables researchers to search and discover full-text articles, dissertations and other content from key publishers in one place and can be accessed at search.proquest.com/coronavirus.

Harvard Business Review

Harvard Business Review has opened up free access to all of it's resources for leading and working through coronavirus. Find them here: http://hbr.org/coronavirus

IHS Markiy

IHS Markit's standards and publishing partners are offering access to select publications for free in an effort to accelerate the manufacturing and production of masks, ventilators and other safety equipment and to find solutions to this pandemic. Free publications include:

• Ventilator standards from BSI Group
• Medical additive manufacturing/ 3D printing community meetings from ASME. April 15 or April 22.
• COVID-19 related journals from ASME
• Mask, Gown, Glove, Sanitizer and Respirator standards from ASTM
• Mask, glove and protective clothing standards from CEN and jointly with ISO
• Infectious control, facility and safety standards from CSA Group
• Safety codes and standards from NFPA
• Handbooks, guidance and standards from ASHRAE
• Standards and TIRs from AAMI
• Numerous journals from McGraw-Hill, Wiley, Springer and other publishers

IHS Markit Experts are also  providing daily guidance on market impacts from this pandemic. Please visit their Coronavirus Resource Center to access these materials. 

Sage

Sage is sharing free-to-access research and data related to COVID-19 and its impact: Medical research  

Sage is also providing a curated collection of both medical and social and behavioral science related to the virus and more broadly on managing pandemics:

Taylor and Francis

Taylor and Francis have launched a microsite consolidating journal and book resources on COVID-19.  This is currently being updated based on daily keyword scans of articles in production to ensure that we are making all COVID-19 research free at the point of publication.

The Royal Society

he Royal Society is supporting our librarian and researcher communities by collating relevant articles on COVID-19 into a collection, and will be updating this collection as we publish more research.

  

Wiley

Wiley has made more than 5,000 COVID-19-related articles freely available in support of the global efforts in diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. 

Emerald

Emerald have made research on COVID-19 and the management of epidemics and pandemics free for anyone to access and have also made this available with full text and data mining rights to PubMed Central and the World Health Organisation repository.

Elsevier

Elsevier’s free health and medical research on novel coronavirus (COVID-19): Novel Coronavirus Information Center.

Also Elsevier are providing free access to Science Directs Coronavirus articles.

Springer Nature

Springer Nature is now providing FREE ACCESS to it's Central Research Hub which provides essential research in slowing the spread of COVID-19. They have made available for free all relevant research they have published and continue to publish, and are strongly urging their authors to submit articles related to this emergency and to share underlying datasets relating to the outbreak as rapidly and widely as possible.

  

WARC

WARC are also providing access to all their Covid-19 coverage. 

  

Oxford University Press 

Oxford University Press has a comprehensive hub of the latest COVID-19 research, freely available for the duration of the outbreak, in order to support researchers, medical professionals, and public health professionals in dealing with the crisis.

Cambridge Core

Cambridge Core are providing free access to their coronavirus research. More than 80 relevant book chapters and journal articles are currently in the collection, with future articles being added once they are published.

CNKI

CNKI are opening access to COVID-19 related resources during this challenging time.
1.      Research Papers on Covid-19 (English Abstracts, Chinese full text)
Full text articles on issues such as disease prevention and control, pathology, clinical diagnosis and treatment, the development of new drugs and technology breakthroughs.
2.      Ebooks related to COVID-19 (Chinese)
3. Others: Free English news resources from China (English)
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/ China Daily
http://en.people.cn/  People's Daily Online
http://en.nhc.gov.cn National Health Commission of PRC

  

Online Tools for Understanding Health Research

PubChase: biomedical current awareness and recommendation tool. #TOCs

PubChase is a free biomedical literature search and recommendation tool, available on the web, iOS, and Android devices. Search, organize, and discover research of interest to you.Worth a look if you need to stay up to date with a range of journals, topics and authors in this subject.

Europe PubMed Central: take the new Quick Tour for students and researchers

Europe PMC is a free database of biomedical and health research literature. The resource provides access to over 30 million abstracts and more than 3 million full text articles (see below). Additionally, the details of more than 44 000 biomedical research grants are available.

A new Quick Tour of Europe PMC is now available and aims to give a basic understanding of Europe PMC and its use, which makes it an ideal resource for final year undergrad students working on a project or postgraduate researchers.




Europe PMC provides access to all the abstracts in PubMed, as well as other sets of abstracts not available through PubMed (e.g. Agricola and Chinese Biological Abstracts). It also provides access to  other literature content of relevance to biomedical research such as PhD theses and patents.

Cochrane Library systematic reviews in health care: free access

All residents of the Republic of Ireland can access The Cochrane Library for free, funded by the Health Research Board in Dublin. This  provides open access to the full text of 4000 Cochrane health care  systematic reviews .

The Cochrane Collaboration is an international non-profit and independent organisztion dedicated to making up-to-date, accurate information about the effects of healthcare readily available worldwide. It produces systematic reviews of the effects of healthcare interventions and makes these available in the Cochrane Library.

What is a Systematic Review?

Cochrane Reviews are systematic reviews, which provide an overview of the effects of interventions in health care and, where possible, an estimate of the size of any benefits or harms of these interventions. Each review covers a specific and well-defined area of health care and evidence from clinical trials is included or excluded on the basis of explicit quality criteria. 

Systematic reviews differ from other types of review in that they adhere to a strict design in order to make them more comprehensive, to minimize bias, and to ensure their reliability. Rather than reflecting the views of the authors or being based on a partial selection of the literature (as is the case with many articles and reviews that are not explicitly systematic), they contain all known references to trials on a particular topic and a comprehensive summary of the available evidence. The reviews are valuable sources of information for those receiving care, as well as for decision makers and researchers.

Understanding Health Research: new evaluation tool

Can I trust the findings of this health study? How do I make sense of this piece of research from the net?  Finding and evaluating research of good academic quality for use in assignments can be tricky.

The Understanding Health Research tool is designed to help you judge the quality of health studies, so that when you come across a piece of health research, or an article you can assess for yourself whether to trust it. The tool guides you through a series of questions to ask about the study, and, based on the answers to those questions, it helps you to assess its credibility.  There are different pathways depending on whether you found the study in the media, on a health website or in an original scientific paper. You can quickly check to see if the basic features of the study are credible, and, if you choose to analyse the study in more detail, you will be guided through a more in-depth assessment.

To help you weigh up the credibility of health studies, the tool provides guidance on concepts such as correlation and causation, scientific uncertainty and the use of statistics. Additional resources are offered, including explanatory guides, and links to external resources.

Definitely worth a try if you're new to using health resources and reports. Another useful resource for evaluating science and health science information on the net is Sense about Science.

Engage in Research: Bioscience Students Resource

Engage in Science is a resource designed to help bioscience students with advice and assistance on the most important aspects of scientific research. Whether you need help with identifying resources, doing a literature review or  you're struggling with statistical analyses, you'll find the information here. You'll also find worked examples, exercises with answers, help sheets and quick quizzes to help you gauge your understanding.

Healthwell resource and the Institute of Public Health

The Health Well is an all-island (Ireland and Northern Ireland) health information website supporting evidence-informed decision making. It provides assistances in.

• Accessing health related research and information sources (Lenus, Hiqa, Nice etc)
• Hosting webgroups and supporting key health networks
• Using information more effectively (with online analysis tools and support for knowledge translation) 

It also aims to build the health intelligence capacity of public health workers and health related organizations.
The Health Well, encompassing its hubs, data tools and web groups, is managed by the INIsPHO Team in the Institute of Public Health in Ireland (IPH).

Cochrane Systematic Reviews

Cochrane Reviews are systematic reviews of primary research in human health care and are internationally recognised as the highest standard in evidence-based health care. They investigate the effects of interventions for prevention and treatment and  assess the accuracy of a diagnostic test for a condition in a specific patient group and setting. They are published online in The Cochrane Library.

Each systematic review addresses a clearly formulated question; for example: Can antibiotics help in alleviating the symptoms of a sore throat? All the existing primary research on a topic that meets certain criteria is searched for and collated, and then assessed using stringent guidelines, to establish whether or not there is conclusive evidence about a specific treatment. The reviews are updated regularly, ensuring that treatment decisions can be based on the most up-to-date and reliable evidence.

PubMed Central: Quick tour

This quick tour from EMBL-EBI gives a brief introduction to Europe PubMedCentral: a free literature resource for biomedical and health researchers. This tour last approx 30 minutes and is ideal for biochemists, medical researchers and biologists. Click here to begin.

Europe PubMed Central for biomedical researchers

Europe PubMed Central is a unique, free, information resource for biomedical and health researchers.

 

Search

28 million+ abstracts and 2.6 million+ full text research articles from PubMed and PubMed Central

Discover

who is citing who, find related data resources and browse summaries of key terms

Access

additional content including biological patents, clinical guidelines, PhD theses and research reports.

Genetic Testing = TMI?

Like much new scientific technology, human genetic testing offers many advantages but also presents  problems. Genetic testing can now detect over 2,500 medical conditions, but only about 500 of these are treatable. So do you really want to know about the likelihood of this happening to you or your family? William Reville presents the pros and cons in today's IT article.

Forensic cancer treatment: DNA mapping

The new Tumor Profiling Unit labs at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) will use information in tumour DNA to help find the best "personalised" treatments. Its director Prof Alan Ashworth said this was not science fiction and would be day-to-day practice within a decade. The centre will also investigate how cancers become resistant to drugs.

The field of cancer research is moving rapidly away from defining a cancer by where it is in the body. Instead scientists and doctors are looking deeper at what is going wrong inside cancerous cells - a tumour can have 100,000 genetic mutations and these alter over time. Rapid advances in genome profiling are allowing breakthroughs in understanding which mutations transform a healthy cell into a cancerous one. Read more at the ICR website or follow @ICRNews

Text-mining for scientific research v publishers

Researchers are pushing for an end to publishers' default ban on computer scanning of thousands of papers to find links between genes and diseases. The scale of new information in modern science is huge; more than 1.5m scholarly articles are published every year and the volume of data doubles every three years. No individual can keep up with such a volume, and scientists need computers to help them digest and make sense of the information. The restrictions placed by publishers on text mining has led campaigners to view the issue as another front in the battle to make publicly funded research work available through "open access", free at the point of use. That would allow researchers to mine the content freely without needing to request any extra permissions. Read more on this controversy from the Guardian here.

PerSSonalised Medicine resource

Keeping track of updates and news in your subject area can be time-consuimg and even confusing at times.
PeRSSonalisd Medcine is a free customizable aggregator of quality medical resources in social media. View medical and biomedical realted news, subject tags, a selection of journal article updates, blogs, podcasts, slideshows and Youtube videos on your topic all in one place. Customize it to suit your research interest.

Webicinia

Webicina is a free service that provides curated medical social media resources in over 80 medical topics in over 17 languages for medical professsionals and students. An webicina app is available for smartphone use. A selection of social media resources in medical and biomedical specialties are provided such as:

• Nutrition
• Microbiology
• Endocrinology
• Pathology
• Ophthalmology
• Bioinformatics
• Pharma
• Vaccines

Academic Search Complete

The Academic Search Premier database subscription has upgraded to Academic Search Complete.

Subject coverage includes biology, ethics chemistry, engineering,  materials science, mathematics, pharma sciences and physics.

Content includes:

• More than 13,000 abstracted and indexed journals
• Nearly 9,000 full-text journals
• Full text for more than 7,700 peer-reviewed journals
• Searchable cited references provided for more than 1,400 journals
• Daily updates

 An EBSCO iPhone and Android database app is also available. Click here to access the database.

Molecular Structures Resource

The RSCB PDB or protein data bank is an information portal to biological macromolecular structures and is a free single worldwide repository of information about the 3D structures of large biological molecules, including proteins and nucleic acids. You can search by macromolecule, ligand or sequence and the PDB now contains over 77,000 structures.

NLM apps

Hot on the heels of other information providers the National Library of Medicine is now providing a selection of apps and mobile website links for those who like to research on the move or use an iPad. Have a look at their range of mobile technology services if it's the kind of thing that works for you. Resources covered include DailyMed, PubMed and Medline Mobile amongst others.

UK PubMed Central

UKPMC is a  free information resource for biomedical and health researchers and was developed with the founders of PubMed and PubMed Central and the National Center for Biotechnology Information. UKPMC provides a single point of access full-text articles and the abstracts available through PubMed as well as the following resources:

• 1.8 million full text, peer reviewed journal articles in all fields of biomedical research (the UK PubMed  Central repository)
• 24 million+ PubMed and PubMed Central abstracts
• National Health Service (NHS) clinical guidelines
• UK biomedical and health PhD theses
• European Patent Office Patents, Agricola, Chinese Biological Abstracts and Citeseer databases