JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

The emergence of COVID-19 spurred the formation of myriad teams to tackle every conceivable aspect of the virus and thwart its spread. Collaboration has become a constant theme throughout the 2019 novel coronavirus pandemic and has resulted in expedition of the scientific process (including vaccine development), rapid consolidation of global outbreak data and statistics, as well as experimentation with novel partnerships. Enabling these collaborative efforts is a state of global connectedness where data travels between countries in fractions of a second, allowing for partnerships and information sharing to occur virtually, with no need for physical proximity or even prior knowledge of your collaborators. The objective of this article is to document the evolution of these collaborative efforts, using illustrative examples collected by the authors throughout the pandemic and supplemented with publications from the JMIR COVID-19 Special Issue on coronavirus. Over 60 projects rooted in collaboration are categorized into five main themes: knowledge dissemination; data propagation; crowdsourcing; artificial intelligence; and hardware design and development. They highlight the numerous ways that citizens, industry professionals, researchers, and academics have come together globally to consolidate information and produce products geared towards combating the COVID-19 pandemic. With the overwhelming quantity of information, it can be challenging to gauge quality and detect misinformation, which is exacerbated by the inability to rapidly collect and share robust public health data. Initially, researchers and citizen scientists scrambled to pull together any accessible data. As global curated data sets started to emerge, numerous derivative works, such as visualizations or models, were developed that depended on the consistency of that data and which would fail when there were unanticipated changes. Crowdsourcing was used to collect and analyze data, aid in contact tracing, and to produce personal protective equipment (PPE) by sharing open designs for 3D printing. National and international consortia of entrepreneurs collaborated with researchers, including a Nobel Laureate, to create a ventilator that received rapid government approval and which was based on an open-source design. An equally impressive coalition of NGOs and governmental organizations led by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy created a shared open resource of over 200,000 research publications about COVID-19 and subsequently challenged experts in artificial intelligence to answer 17 key questions, offering cash prizes for the best solutions. A thread of collaboration weaved throughout the pandemic response, which represents more than a series of random events. Thrust upon us, it will shape future efforts, pandemic or non-pandemic related. Novel partnerships, combining citizens, entrepreneurs, small businesses, corporations, academia, and governmental and non-governmental organizations will cross boundaries to create new processes, products and better solutions to consequential societal challenges.