  The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed the rapid dissemination of papers and
preprints investigating the disease and its associated virus, SARS-CoV-2. The
multifaceted nature of COVID-19 demands a multidisciplinary approach, but the
urgency of the crisis combined with the need for social distancing measures
present unique challenges to collaborative science. We applied a massive online
open publishing approach to this problem using Manubot. Through GitHub,
collaborators summarized and critiqued COVID-19 literature, creating a review
manuscript. Manubot automatically compiled citation information for referenced
preprints, journal publications, websites, and clinical trials. Continuous
integration workflows retrieved up-to-date data from online sources nightly,
regenerating some of the manuscript's figures and statistics. Manubot rendered
the manuscript into PDF, HTML, LaTeX, and DOCX outputs, immediately updating
the version available online upon the integration of new content. Through this
effort, we organized over 50 scientists from a range of backgrounds who
evaluated over 1,500 sources and developed seven literature reviews. While many
efforts from the computational community have focused on mining COVID-19
literature, our project illustrates the power of open publishing to organize
both technical and non-technical scientists to aggregate and disseminate
information in response to an evolving crisis.
