With a poor return of value, and a huge overhead for research, patents are a bad investment for the academy, this article argues. 

How have Open Science principles fared in times of COVID-19?

In the last decade Open Science principles, such as Open Access, study preregistration, use of preprints, making available data and code, and open peer review, have been successfully advocated for and are being slowly adopted in many different research communities. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic many publishers and researchers have sped up their adoption of some of these Open Science practices, sometimes embracing them fully and sometimes partially or in a sub-optimal manner. In this article, we express concerns about the violation of some of the Open Science principles and its potential impact on the quality of research output. We provide evidence of the misuses of these principles at different stages of the scientific process. We call for a wider adoption of Open Science practices in the hope that this work will encourage a broader endorsement of Open Science principles and serve as a reminder that science should always be a rigorous process, reliable and transparent, especially in the context of a pandemic where research findings are being translated into practice even more rapidly. We provide all data and scripts at . ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

The paper argues for the development of open science in Africa as a means of energising national science systems and their roles in supporting public and private sectors and the general public.

UNESCO is launching international consultations aimed at developing a Recommendation on Open Science for adoption by member states in 2021. Its Recommendation will include a common definition, a shared set of values, and proposals for action. At the invitation of the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, this paper aims to contribute to the consultation process by answering questions such as: • Why and how should science be "open"? For and with whom? • Is it simply a matter of making scientific articles and data fully available to researchers around the world at the time of publication, so they do not miss important results that could contribute to or accelerate their work? • Could this openness also enable citizens around the world to contribute to science with their capacities and expertise, such as through citizen science or participatory action research projects? • Does science that is truly open include a plurality of ways of knowing, including those of Indigenous cultures, Global South cultures, and other excluded, marginalized groups in the Global North? The paper has four sections: "Open Science and the pandemic" introduces and explores different forms of openness during a crisis where science suddenly seems essential to the well-being of all. The next three sections explain the main dimensions of three forms of scientific openness: openness to publications and data, openness to society, and openness to excluded knowledges2 and epistemologies3. We conclude with policy considerations. A French version of this paper is available here: https://zenodo.org/record/3947013#.Xw-Ksx17nOQ

This study presents indicators of open access at the institutional level for universities worldwide. By combining data from Web of Science, Unpaywall and the Leiden Ranking disambiguation of institutions, it tracks OA coverage of universities' output for 963 institutions.