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Emerging and reemerging infectious diseases are constant challenges for public health worldwide. Recent cases of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan, China, have led to the discovery of a new type of Coronavirus (2019-nCoV), which are enveloped RNA viruses, commonly found in humans, other mammals and birds, capable of causing respiratory, enteric, hepatic, and neurological disease. …

On December 31st 2019 the World Health Organization (WHO) was notified of the occurrence of a pneumonia outbreak in the city of Wuhan, Hubei Province, People's Republic of China. The etiological agent was rapidly identified as a novel coronavirus: SARS-COV-2. The outbreak began in a seafood and live animals market and, as at the date of this publication, the animal reservoir is unknown. …

The emergence of SARS-Cov-2 virus in Wuhan, China, in December of 2019 led to a local epidemic that rapidly spread to multiple countries in the world, placing remarkable challenges in surveillance and control. In March 16th, 2020, WHO declared that the infection associated with SARS-Cov-2, named COVID-19, had spread to more than 100 countries, with more than 160,000 confirmed cases and more than 6,000 deaths globally. …

Peer review is the intrinsic process of scientific research. However, there are few systematic studies on this procedure, and it is not easy to gain access to management information administered by publishers. The PEERE project, funded by the European Community, would make this data available as a public good. …

As research and government responses to the COVID-19 outbreak escalate in the face of a global public health crisis, Vincent Larivière, Fei Shu and Cassidy R. Sugimoto reflect on efforts to make research on this subject more widely available. Arguing that a narrow focus on research published in high ranking journals predominantly in English has impeded research efforts, they suggest that the renewed emphasis on carrying out open research on the virus presents an opportunity to reassess how research and scholarly communication systems serve the public good. …

Our preprints story continues with a guest post by SciELO. In addition to seed funding to make Open Preprint Systems (OPS) possible, SciELO is working closely with the PKP team to make sure that the software is developed and maintained following state-of-the-art best practices and that its features satisfy the needs of a diverse community. …

Our story begins in February 2017 when SciELO first announced their quest for a preprint server. Like many circa 2016, SciELO was coming around to the idea that preprints could and would serve an important part in their strategy for open science. But despite a clear vision and path to get there, SciELO was missing an important piece: infrastructure. …

Policies, incentives, evaluation processes, leadership approaches... are they undermining scientific research? A quantitative online survey of more than 4,200 researchers conducted by the Wellcome Trust foundation of the United Kingdom seems to show clear evidence that there are widespread problems in the research culture. Those who finance, publish, evaluate or conduct research can now use this evidence as a starting point to implement solutions. However, are these human management problems with scientific research staff different from other fields of activity, such as work or sports? …

With 40 years of uninterrupted publication, Brazilian Journal of Nephrology traces the path towards its internationalization, based on professionalization and without constant improvement of its editorial processes and scientific quality. It is now in a new phase, where reaching its greatest indexing potential and strengthening its presence in Latin America represent its main challenges. …

The opening of research data is one of the practices of open science that is progressively being globalized. In November 2019, the Network of Scientific Data Repositories of the State of São Paulo, formed by eight universities and research institutions, was launched. In January 2020, leaders of eight university networks gathered at the International Research Data Rights Summit at Sorbonne Université signed the Sorbonne Declaration on Research Data Rights, which is reproduced in this post in the original English version. …