Open Knowledge may yet come to medicine – let’s help make it happen | Open Knowledge Foundation Blog

"Today is International Clinical Trials Day. To mark the event, here’s a post from Iain Hrynaszkiewicz reviewing the current state of open knowledge in medicine. You can see an earlier version on F1000’s blog ... The European Medicines Agency (EMA), the organisation which approves drug license applications from the pharmaceutical industry in Europe, has made important progress towards more open science. They hope to release anonymised data from drug trials online, but are faced with widely divided opinions on how data sharing should happen, as well aslegal challenges in making it happen. The Open Knowledge community has a chance to help produce better outcomes for the beneficiaries of medical research.  On 30 April 2013 the EMA published advice documents, which cover five different aspects of clinical data sharing and are designed to help the EMA craft their policy on data release. The advice was sourced from around 200 volunteers from across the drug industry, academic research, publishing, and patient advocacy communities. I’ll be the first point out this is not an open data policy – it’s a data sharing or data access policy. The EMA is, along with most medical research, a long way from implementing an Open Knowledge-compliant data policy – with data rapidly released in machine-readable formats to the public domain. But amongst the documents released there are some pertinent developments – worrying and promising in equal measures – that the open science community should recognise now ... "