Data for: Open COVID Trials (OCT) Project

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought substantial attention to the systems
used to communicate biomedical research. In particular, the need to
rapidly and credibly communicate research findings has led many
stakeholders to encourage researchers to adopt open science practices such
as posting preprints and sharing data. To examine the degree to which this
has led to the actual adoption of such practices, we examined the
“openness” of a sample of 539 published papers describing the results of
randomized controlled trials testing interventions to prevent or treat
COVID-19. The majority (56%) of the papers in this sample were free to
read at the time of our investigation and 23.56% were preceded by
preprints. However, there is no guarantee that the papers without an open
license will be available without a subscription in the future, and only
49.61% of the preprints we identified were linked to the subsequent
peer-reviewed version. Of the 331 papers in our sample with statements
identifying if (and how) related datasets were available, only a paucity
indicated that data was available in a repository that facilitates rapid
verification and reuse. Our results demonstrate that, while progress has
been made, there is still a significant mismatch between aspiration and
actual practice in the adoption of open science in an important area of
the COVID-19 literature.

新型冠状病毒肺炎（COVID-19）大流行使得生物医学研究成果传播体系受到了高度重视。具体而言，为快速且可靠地传播研究成果，众多利益相关方纷纷鼓励研究人员采用开放科学（open science）实践，例如发布预印本（preprint）与共享研究数据。为探究此类倡议对开放科学实践实际落地的影响程度，本研究对539篇已发表论文的"开放度"展开分析——这些论文均针对用于预防或治疗新型冠状病毒肺炎的干预措施开展随机对照试验（randomized controlled trial, RCT）并报道相关结果。在本研究样本中，56%的论文在调研阶段可免费获取，另有23.56%的论文在正式发表前曾发布过预印本。但无法保证未获得开放许可的论文在未来仍可免费阅读；且本研究识别出的预印本中，仅有49.61%与后续经过同行评审的正式论文版本存在关联。在样本中331篇明确说明相关数据集是否可用、以及如何获取的论文里，仅有极少数提及数据存储于可支持快速验证与复用的数据存储库中。本研究结果显示，尽管新冠疫情相关生物医学研究领域在开放科学实践方面已取得一定进展，但开放科学的理念倡导与实际落地之间仍存在显著差距。