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Fox Focus | Research
Open Access to
Research Results:
Our Foundation’s Core
Commitment to Put Patients First
COVID-19 is shining a spotlight on the
importance of research collaboration. As
the pandemic mounts, scientists around the
globe have been racing to develop effective
treatments and a vaccine to protect us from the
devastating new coronavirus. This has ignited
an extraordinary volume of research and data
sharing, enabling scientists to learn from each
other and move faster in pursuit of a cure.
In an effort to fast-track life-saving COVID-19
research, thousands of papers detailing
new data sets and literature on potential
avenues to stop the disease are flowing into
the research community through openaccess
forums known as pre-print servers. By
pushing early results into the public sphere
faster, pre-print servers and open-access
approaches aim to allow researchers to
home in more quickly on what seems to be
working and what doesn’t, so that resources
can be concentrated on the most promising
strategies to defeat the virus.
Just as the global population urgently awaits
medical solutions to COVID-19, Parkinson’s
patients and families urgently need better
treatments and a cure for Parkinson’s disease.
And the same commitment to collaboration
and open sharing of knowledge is accelerating
Parkinson’s drug development. This spring,
The Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF)
announced a formal policy requiring
that all scientific articles resulting from
Foundation-funded work be published in
an open access forum, such as pre-print