PLOS Medicine: The Role of Open Access in Reducing Waste in Medical Research

Use the link to access the full text article from PLoS Medicine.  "Twenty years ago an editorial by Doug Altman in the BMJ [1], 'The Scandal of Poor Medical Researc'”, decried the poor design and reporting of research, stating that 'huge sums of money are spent annually on research that is seriously flawed through the use of inappropriate designs, unrepresentative samples, small samples, incorrect methods of analysis, and faulty interpretation'. Since then, change has been gradual, while the list of problems has lengthened, and documentation of their magnitude has accumulated. Recent years, however, have seen a crescendo of concern. Public awareness has been accelerated with the publication of Ben Goldacre's Bad Pharma [2], which clearly articulated the problems posed by biased non-publication and reporting of pharmaceutical research. Wider awareness of these issues helped spark the AllTrials campaign (http://www.alltrials.net/), which asks for 'all trials registered; all results reported'. Of course, the problems of poor design and reporting, as well as selective non-publication, extend well beyond drug trials to most areas of research: drug and non-drug, basic and applied, interventional and observational, animal and human. A 2009 paper in The Lancet [3] estimated that three problems—flawed design, non-publication, and poor reporting—together meant over 85% of research funds were wasted, implying a global total loss of over US$100 billion per year. This year, a follow-up series [4] more extensively documented this wastage, confirming the earlier estimate, but adding details and a series of more explicit recommendations for action. The waste sounds bad, but the reality is worse. The estimate that 85% of research is wasted referred only to activities prior to the point of publication. Much waste clearly occurs after publication: from poor access, poor dissemination, and poor uptake of the findings of research. The development of open access to research [5] is important to reduce this post-publication waste. Poor access—including paywalls, restrictions on re-publication and re-use, etc.—limits both researcher-to-researcher and researcher-to-clinician communications. As PLOS Medicine editorial leaders pointed out in a PubMed Commons response to the Lancet series [6], open access is more than free access and includes 'free, immediate access online; unrestricted distribution and re-use rights in perpetuity for humans and technological applications; author(s) retains rights to attribution; papers are immediately deposited in a public online archive, such as PubMed Central' [7]. Globally, the most important access problem is arguably due to language barriers, and with the growth of research in non-English-speaking countries, particularly China, this problem is likely to grow. Language barriers make even free-access research unusable, but by eliminating restrictions on re-publication and re-use, open access can at least reduce barriers to translation ..."