Why all pharmaceutical research should be made open access | Cory Doctorow | Technology | guardian.co.uk

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-11-21

Summary:

"I recently had lunch with as staunch an advocate for open access as you'll ever meet (I won't name him, because it would be rude to attribute casual remarks to him without permission). We were talking about plans to mandate free and open publication of publicly funded scientific research. In the USA, there's the Federal Public Research Act, and in the UK, there's the coalition government's announcement that publicly funded research should be made available at no cost, under a Creative Commons licence that permits unlimited copying. We'd been talking about Ben Goldacre's excellent new book, Bad Pharma, in which Goldacre documents the problem of 'missing data' in pharmaceutical research (he says about half of the clinical trials undertaken by the pharmaceutical industry are never published). The unpublished trials are, of course, the trials that show the pharma companies' new products in unflattering lights – trials that suggest that their drugs don't work very well, or don't work at all, or are actively harmful. The decades-old industry practice of suppressing scientific evidence (and some independent researchers doing the same) leads Goldacre to declare that nothing we know about modern medicine should be assumed to be correct, and he makes the urgent case for forcing the release of all that pharma dark matter so scientists can re-run the numbers and work out what actually does work. I mentioned this to my lunchmate, finishing with: 'And that's why all pharma research must be open access.' 'All publicly funded pharma research,' he said, as though correcting a mistake in elementary arithmetic. 'If the public pays for it, they should see it, but if pharmaceutical companies want to pay for their own research, well …'

Link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/nov/20/pharmaceutical-research-open-access

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.medicine oa.new oa.data oa.licensing oa.comment oa.government oa.mandates oa.usa oa.frpaa oa.legislation oa.advocacy oa.copyright oa.cc oa.uk oa.lay oa.reproducibility oa.biomedicine oa.benefits oa.clinical_trials oa.credibility oa.libre oa.policies oa.pharma

Date tagged:

11/21/2012, 13:14

Date published:

11/21/2012, 08:14