An interplay of ideas: Covid-19 improved the way world pursued science

The current pandemic will eventually end, leaving us more free to ponder what to keep from all the changes it has wrought. One obvious candidate is open-access scientific journals.

Most relevant scientific advances on the Covid-19 front have been put online in open-access form and then debated online. Even if they later came out in refereed journals, their real impact came during their early open-access days.

Open-access publishing has obvious advantages. The articles are free, the whole world can read them, and the interplay of ideas they generate is easier to track. As scientific contributions come from a greater number of different