2020/12/22 by Elke Roesner, Roesner, Elke
Arts and Humanities · Decision Sciences · Medicine · Social Sciences · #610 Medical sciences #AGMB #Academic Publishing and Open Access #COVID-19 #Consumer behavior in food and health #Corona #Forschungsunterstützung #Forschungszentrum #German MLA (AGMB) #Hub #Information Hub #Infrastruktureinrichtung #Lebenswissenschaften #Leuchtturmwettbewerb #Libraries and Information Services #Medicine #NFDI4Health #PrePrintViewer #Task Force COVID-19 #ZB MED #corona #hub #information hub #infrastructure centre #life sciences #pioneer project competition #research centre #research support
paper · doi:10.3205/mbi000478
openalex publication_date 2020/12/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/19
Right at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of researchers and colleagues from the library sector set themselves the task of supporting research on the SARS-Cov-2 virus. In March 2020, ZB MED established the COVID-19 Hub: Since then, the platform offers a collection of various resources of free literature, current sources and text mining corpora. The ZB MED COVID-19 Hub also contains interactive bioinformatics tools for molecular biology researchers such as Genome Browser, Multiple Sequence Alignment Viewer and phylogenetic trees of the complete SARS-CoV-2 genomes. ZB MED has also set up an automated search for SARS-CoV-2 on the search portal LIVIVO. Within NFDI4Health, ZB MED has set up the COVID-19 Task Force with various partners. As a first result within the initiative, the ZB MED team has developed the COVID-19 Preprint Viewer. In September 2020, the ZB MED team won the special prize in the competition of the German MLA (AGMB) “Pioneer projects in medical libraries” for the ZB MED COVID-19 Hub. In the laudation it is stated: “The COVID-19 Hub has been developed at an extraordinary speed and currently represents an indispensable and freely accessible information resource for virologists, epidemiologists and other researchers”.