By Jeffrey BrainardScience's COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center.Timothy Sheahan, a virologist studying COVID-19, wishes he could keep pace with the growing torrent of new scientific papers about the disease and the novel coronavirus that causes it.
But there are just too many—more than 4000 alone last week. “I’m not keeping up,” says Sheahan, who works at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “It’s impossible.”A loose-knit army of data scientists, software developers, and journal publishers is pressing hard to change that.
Backed by large technology firms and the White House, they are racing to create digital collections holding thousands of freely available papers that could be useful to ending the pandemic,