Information technology efforts against COVID-19: A review of open source projects

Abstract

Currently, efforts have focused on dealing with the emerging coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) worldwide. Hopefully, information technology can be applied to meet the challenges related to the pandemic and biosurveillance. Free and open-source software (FOSS) model has emerged as an effective tool against these challenges. The main objective of this study was to determine and summarize the application of FOSS in published and released resources and materials against COVID-19. This review includes projects that were available through GitHub and SourceForge reliable web-based materials. All projects were identified between January 1 and April 10, 2020. Search terms in GitHub and Source Forge were based on clinical terminologies, such as COVID-19, COVID, Covid19, and Corona Virus. Inclusion or exclusion criteria were used to filter the results. Finally, a screening procedure was followed to achieve the most related records. We identified 46,426 records in GitHub and seven projects in Source Forge. The top 40 projects were included. The results show that a high percentage of FOSS projects against COVID-19 were related to visual dashboards. The open dataset and analytical methods made a significant contribution to this context. Previously learned lessons from FOSS have shown that the explained projects would play important roles in future epidemics by forking and joining in new projects, which formed around a specific problem.