COVID-19 Pandemic, the Value of Open Access to Research, and Role of Agile Peer Review

The emergence of the Internet has changed the landscape of academic publishing. Digitalization facilitated peer review, publishing procedures, and content retrieval (Suber 2012). However, the majority of academic articles were brought behind pay walls, thus remaining inaccessible to a wider audience. This initiated another approach towards academic publishing in the early 1990s when the open access movement was conceived. Its protagonists, underlining the openness as a fundamental scientific ethos, launched open access publishing venues to provide free usage of scholarly content (Bjork, 2018)