Speeding up peer review and manuscript publication during COVID 19: can collaboration work?

The C19 Rapid Review collaboration was established in March 2020 and now includes more than 20 publishers, industry experts and endorsers. The group is focussed on trying to working together to solve key issues linked to publishing during the COVID-19 pandemic. So far the group has focussed on creating a rapid reviewer pool, an ability to transfer papers between journals involved in the collaboration and aiming to fast-track publication of COVID-19 papers. This poster summarises the results so far and was recently presented at OASPA 20202. It is clear academics wants to be rapid reviewers (although they have not yet been used in the numbers we'd have liked), that we are not seeing transfers of papers and that most publishers in the initiative are publishing COVID-19 papers with shorter turnaround times than non-COVID-19 papers.  The group continues to work together to find new ways to collaborate during this time.