March 13, 2020
AAP Statement on White House Effort to Convene Researchers, Funders and Publishers in Effort to Combat COVID-19
The Association of American Publishers (AAP) issued the following comment from President & CEO Maria Pallante on the White House letter recently circulated to the scholarly publishing community from Chief Science Advisors or their equivalents in a dozen countries encouraging publishers to take action to help end the COVID-19 global health crisis.
“The Association of American Publishers applauds the Administration’s leadership in convening researchers, funders, and publishers in the global emergency to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Publishers purposefully and continuously contribute to the advancement of science and medicine by investing billions of dollars in producing and disseminating high-quality, peer-reviewed journal articles. In this urgent and serious environment, we are grateful to the many publishers who are doing their part to communicate valuable discoveries, analyses, and data as quickly as possible, including by making their copyrighted articles pertaining to the virus freely available for public use during this crisis, in both text and machine-readable formats. Many publishers – both commercial companies and nonprofit societies – have been doing so for weeks.”
###