Update 1 May 2023: In response to author requests, we have extended the final submission deadline to Monday 5 June 2023.

Introduction

Data & Policy - a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Cambridge University Press (cambridge.org/dap) in association with the Data for Policy Conference - is calling for contributions to a special collection of papers on 'Data for Epidemic Preparedness and Containment Policy: data informed intervention for public health’.

This collection will look directly at the interplay between data and policy to design evidence-based epidemic emergency responses.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has pointed the magnifying glass on the role of policymakers to prevent and control the spreading of the disease. The consequent burden on the economy and the healthcare system worldwide has stressed the necessity of science-informed policy to aid the population and the healthcare system to face the emergency. In this scenario, the role of data from both conventional and unconventional sources has been essential to design efficient interventions [1]. In addition to surveillance, the usage of digital data has contributed to exploring behavioral changes in the population to better understand and model epidemic dynamics. Mobile data have been used to inform the public response and the implementation of non-pharmaceutical interventions, contact-tracing apps have been integrated into national healthcare systems to inform public health actions [2], and the analysis of social networks data has helped to assess multiple instances of population wellbeing, e.g. mental distress consequent to social distancing. Moreover, data policy has been also crucial to ensure both security and access to prompt perform the analysis. Platforms such as Twitter or Facebook have granted extended data access to academic institutions to accelerate the research around COVID-19. The collection and sharing of new datasets have been crucial to this scope, shedding the light on the importance of open data policy [3].

The next challenge will be assessing preparedness to face the upcoming phases of the pandemic. This special issue will investigate the roles of data and policy in designing informed strategies to front health emergencies given the lesson learned from the pandemic.

Data Papers

Note that in addition to original research articles and commentaries, we encourage the submission of data papers to this special collection: articles that provide a structured description of an openly accessible data set. The data paper should describe the study design and methods that generated the data, but the focus should be to help others re-use the data rather than presenting new findings. See the submission section below for more details. 

Key Themes

• Pandemic’s effects on policy making
• Data and preparedness: data-informed policy for the next phases of the pandemic
• Data exploitation for policy:
  • Surveillance
  • Digital data approaches (app integration for monitoring the pandemic, digital data integration of national system, mobility data for policy)
• Dataset description:
  • Public dataset
  • Open data policy 

Timetable

Authors are welcome to submit manuscripts as soon as they are ready, with a final deadline of Monday May 1st Monday 5 June.

Articles will be published as soon as possible after acceptance, allowing authors to disseminate their work without unnecessary delay. On publication, they will be added to a curated page for the collection. An editorial reflecting on their insights will be published when the collection closes.

Submission and review

Data & Policy publishes the following article types. Authors should consider which is the most appropriate category for their work before they submit:

• Research articles: original work that uses rigorous methods to investigate how data science can inform or impact policy.
• Commentaries: shorter articles that discuss and/or problematize an issue relevant to the special issue topic. (Approx 4,000 words in length).
• Translational articles: focus on the policy setting or environment in which data science principles and approaches are being applied, with the aim of improving the transfer of knowledge from research to practice (and vice versa).
• Data papers: provide structured descriptions of a data set relevant to the special issue. The data paper should describe the study design and methods that generated the data, but the focus should be to help others re-use the data rather than presenting new findings.

Templates

To make submission easier for authors, we provide:

• LaTeX and Word templates (appropriate for all article types)
• Word template for Data Papers
• Template in Overleaf (an authoring tool based on LaTeX with collaborative and rich text features and the option to directly submit into the D&P system)

Authors should submit articles through the Data & Policy ScholarOne site, using the 'Data for Epidemic Preparedness and Containment Policy' special collection tag when prompted in the submission forum.

Note that the journal  asks all authors to provide a Data Availability Statement with the submission and encourages authors to make underlying data and replication materials available via an open repository.

Editors

• Daniela Paolotti (ISI Foundation)
• Michele Tizzani (ISI Foundation)

References

[1] Nadai, M. D., Roomp, K., Lepri, B., and Oliver, N. The impact of control and mitigation strategies during the second wave of coronavirus infections in spain and italy. Scientific Reports 12, 1 (Jan. 2022).

[2] Oliver, N., Letouze, E., Sterly, H., Delataille, S., De Nadai, M., Lepri, B., Lambiotte, R., Benjamins, R., Cattuto, C., Colizza, V., de Cordes, N., Fraiberger, S. P., Koebe, T., Lehmann, S., Murillo, J., Pentland, A., Pham, P. N., Pivetta, F., Salah, A. A., Saramaki, J., Scarpino, S. V., Tizzoni, M., Verhulst, S., and Vinck, P.  Mobile phone data and covid-19: Missing an opportunity?, 2020.

[3] S. Punla, C., , C. Farro, R., , and Bataan Peninsula State University Dinalupihan, Bataan, Philippines. Are we there yet?: An analysis of the competencies of BEED graduates of BPSU-DC. International Multidisciplinary Research Journal 4, 3 (Sept. 2022), 50–59.