How COVID-19 Has Affected Research Funding, Publishing and Library Budgets

We’ve recently been completely immersed in a huge project exploring the effects of COVID-19 on research and scholarly communication. We did two massive surveys (10.000+ researchers and 600+ librarians) and reviewed over 100 announcements, reports, posts, etc., from funders, institutions, librarians and researchers.

When starting the project, our assumptions were pretty much as follows:

Universities will have seen their income badly hit, while also having had to invest in making facilities and processes COVID compliant. Libraries (like all communal spaces) will have had to close their doors and institutions may decide never to reopen them, because we will have suddenly, forcibly gone beyond the tipping point in the transition to e-only remote access to library content and services. There will be an unprecedented level of cancellations/renegotiations as libraries cope with seismic budget cuts.
The pandemic will have completely disrupted researchers’ normal workload and workflows. They will be so busy reinventing how they research and teach, and coping with, e.g., homeschooling, that they won’t have time for writing, publishing, reviewing, etc. And the effects will be long lasting because even if and when things return to any kind of norm, there will have been such disruption to their research projects that it will be a while before they have anything to publish.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.