New online hub set to provide access to medical and scientific information from Elsevier’s journals
Publisher Elsevier has launched an online monkeypox information centre that provides free access to relevant content from its journals.
Elsevier said its Monkeypox Information Centre will offer access to journal articles, monographs and book chapters to ensure researchers, clinicians and the public can easily discover content from the growing body of literature on the infectious disease.
Earlier this month, science and technology leaders from across the globe sent an open letter to scholarly publishers calling for immediate open access to papers reporting research on monkeypox.
The publisher Springer Nature also announced it is making its monkeypox-related content free to access, though it said this would be “assessed on a rolling basis”.
Public health emergency
Elsevier said its hub will give free access to its clinical resources for healthcare professionals in a bid to accelerate the fight against the viral disease.
Monkeypox was declared a public health emergency of international concern by the World Health Organization last month.
The information centre will be updated frequently with the latest research, the publisher said, and will also have a machine-readable corpus to allow the use of text and data mining technologies to identify patterns and relationships in data.
“The Monkeypox Information Centre will support healthcare professionals, clinical researchers, and policy makers in understanding monkeypox, so that best efforts can be made towards its prevention and treatment,” said Kumsal Bayazit, Elsevier’s chief executive.
Almost 3,000 confirmed cases in UK
The latest data from the UK Health and Safety Agency shows there are 2,914 confirmed and 103 highly probable monkeypox cases in the UK.
“While the most recent data suggests the growth of the outbreak has slowed, we continue to see new cases every day,” said William Welfare, incident director at the agency.
“While anyone can get monkeypox, the majority of monkeypox cases in the UK continue to be in gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men, with the infection being passed on mainly through close contact in interconnected sexual networks.
“Please continue to be aware of symptoms, including rashes and blisters, particularly if you have recently had a new sexual partner.”