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NEWS IN FOCUS PUBLISHING Rise of Unpaywall BIOMEDICINE Gene-silencing PHYSICS LHC particle hunters PUBLIC HEALTH Researchers use transforms open-research technology gets first drug embrace brute-force virtual worlds to tackle the landscape p.290 approval p.291 approach p.293 opioid epidemic p.295 DAI KUROKAWA/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK DAI Movement of refugees and fighters in North Kivu is complicating the response by aid workers to an Ebola outbreak. PUBLIC HEALTH War zone complicates roll-out of Ebola vaccine Latest outbreak comes amid fighting in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. BY AMY MAXMEN The virus is spreading in North Kivu and “The situation is volatile,” says Ibrahima Ituri, in the east of the Democratic Republic of Socé-Fall, director of emergency operations id workers in the Democratic Republic the Congo (DRC). As of 12 August, 57 people for the World Health Organization (WHO) in of the Congo began giving an experi- had shown symptoms of Ebola — including Africa, based in Brazzaville in the neighbour- mental Ebola vaccine to health work- 41 who had died. But violence perpetuated ing Republic of Congo. Aers on 8 August — one week after the World by more than 100 armed groups fighting over Even so, in addition to dispensing the Health Organization declared an outbreak of resources in those lush, green provinces has vaccine, researchers are preparing to give the virus. First responders and public-health escalated this year ahead of a presidential elec- people with Ebola experimental antibody staff are scrambling to contain the outbreak tion scheduled for December. This is the DRC’s treatments and anti viral drugs. while planning how to distribute the vaccine to tenth Ebola outbreak since 1976, but it is the Socé-Fall says that at least 2,000 doses of the communities in the middle of a conflict zone. first in this tumultuous eastern region. experimental vaccine, called rVSV-ZEBOV, ©2018 Spri nger Nature Li mited. All ri ghts reserved. 16 AUGUST 2018 | VOL 560 | NATURE | 289 NEWS IN FOCUS remain in the country from the most recent Ebola outbreak, which ended in July, and more doses are on the way. The DRC will need a larger vaccine supply now, because the strategy deployed during the previous outbreak will not work for the current one. During the previous outbreak — which lasted three months — officials vaccinated health workers, people who had had direct contact with someone with Ebola and the contacts of those contacts. But the instabil- ity in North Kivu and Ituri has made track- ing such connections difficult. In towns where people have been infected but offi- cials can’t track down their contacts, work- ers might vaccinate the entire community instead, says Socé-Fall. An inability to track these connections worries epidemiologists because people Jason Priem (left) and Heather Piwowar co-founded Impactstory, which launched Unpaywall in 2016. on the move spread the virus. Humanitar- ian groups estimate that this year, nearly DATA ACCESS 750,000 people in North Kivu and Ituri have fled from militia fighters. And about one million refugees displaced from their homes by the violence over at least the The rise and rise past decade continue to travel frequently between cities in the region. Some refugees migrate to neighbouring countries such as Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. of Unpaywall Aid agencies must now consider how to get into these conflict zones to fight Ebola without endangering their staff. Workers Non-profit is a gift to many academics — and tie-ins with might travel with armed security escorts established scientific search engines could broaden its reach. provided by the DRC government for their protection, said Peter Salama, the WHO’s head of emergency preparedness and BY HOLLY ELSE is now at researchers’ fingertips. These deals response, at a press briefing on 3 August. are also enabling funders, librarians and oth- But a key organization fighting Ebola in fter being kicked out of a hotel confer- ers to study open-access publishing trends the area, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, ence room where they had participated comprehensively for the first time. also known as Doctors Without Borders), in a three-day, open-science workshop “Unpaywall is a groundbreaking develop- hesitates to use that approach. The group Aand hackathon, a group of computer scientists ment,” says Alberto Martín-Martín, who studies feels that travelling with armed escorts simply moved to an adjacent hallway. There, bibliometrics and science communication at the hinders its ability to help people of various Heather Piwowar, Jason Priem and Cristhian University of Grenada in Spain. “It takes us one political affiliations, says Salha Issoufou, the Parra worked all night on software to help aca- step closer to achieving a true open research head of MSF’s operation in DRC. So MSF demics see how much of their work was freely infrastructure.” BRIAN GLANZ/OPEN SCIENCE FED./CC BY will forgo the escorts. available on the Internet. They realized how After participating in the 2011 hackathon, The next phase of the response by the much time had passed only when they noticed Piwowar and Priem founded a non-profit WHO, the DRC government and aid hotel staff starting to prepare for breakfast. organization called Impactstory, in Vancouver, groups will be to use experimental drugs That all-nighter, back in 2011, laid the foun- Canada, where they to treat people who have Ebola. A national dation for Unpaywall. This free service locates “Unpaywall is a refined Unpaywall. review board that evaluates research eth- open-access articles and presents paywalled groundbreaking (Parra is now a con- ics has approved the use of these treat- papers that have been legally archived and are development. It sultant at the World ments, and Steve Ahuka, a virologist at the freely available on other websites to users who takes us one step Bank in Asunción, National Institute for Biomedical Research might otherwise have hit a paywalled version. closer to a true Paraguay.) based in Kinshasa, says that some therapeu- Since one part of the technology was released open research Research by Priem tics have just arrived in the region. in 2016, the service has become indispensa- infrastructure.” and Piwowar pub- One treatment is an antibody called ble for many researchers. And firms that run lished as a preprint mAb114, which was manufactured by established scientific search engines are start- in August 2017 — using Unpaywall, natu- the US government. Others include the ing to make good use of Unpaywall. rally — suggests that almost half of the recent antiviral drugs Favipiravir (T-705), made On 26 July, Elsevier announced plans to research papers that people search for online by Japanese company Toyama Chemical, integrate Unpaywall into its Scopus database are available for free (H. Piwowar et al. Pre- and Remdesivir (GS-5734), produced by searches, allowing it to deliver millions more print at PeerJ Preprints https://doi.org/10.7287/ Gilead, based in Foster City, California. free-to-read papers to users than it does cur- peerj.preprints.3119v1; 2017). But, says Priem, “Thanks to our experience from the rently. Scopus’s embrace of Unpaywall, along “there is a terrific gap between the availability previous outbreak, we are prepared,” says with similar moves by other search engines, and discoverability” of these papers, and it is this Ahuka. ■ means that much more open-access content problem that Unpaywall hopes to solve. 290 | NATURE | VOL 560 | 16 AUGUST 2018 ©2018 Spri nger Nature Li mited. All ri ghts reserved. ©2018 Spri nger Nature Li mited. All ri ghts reserved. .

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