Collaboration on dealing with a future crisis

Professor Edoardo Ongaro has worked closely with his fellow editors of the scientific journal Public Policy and Administration in response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The Professor of Public Management (pictured) has been working with USA-based Associate Professor, Keith Baker and Professor Claire Dunlop in the UK.

The projects include a virtual special issue on usable knowledge and an editorial identifying how public policy and public administration academics can use their research to address the pandemic’s challenges, both open access. There is also a systematic collection of data on whether the pandemic is impacting on equal opportunities (such as for female researchers to publish, due to factors like childcare), with a ‘publishing in a time of COVID-19’ editorial in the next journal summarising this.

Edoardo said: “We decided on this course of action to complement, rather than repeat, what other journals are doing. Rather than fast-tracking papers, we decided to identify streams of research in the field which may be usable by policy-makers, practitioners and academics alike to form the response to this tragic pandemic.

“We want to improve public policies and administrative capacities to cope with future high-impact threats, using research based on the robust standards required for publication. We didn’t want to hamper the quality of our papers by being too fast moving with incomplete evidence, and there’s plenty of journals and other outlets available for this anyway.”