To Invent Our Way Beyond COVID-19, We Need Open Science | Common Dreams Views

Big pharma’s secretive, profit-driven model of science is making the invention and dissemination of COVID treatments and vaccines more difficult than it needs to be. Big pharma generally prefers to keep its scientific advances on COVID-19 as secret as possible, even though this secrecy needlessly slows down the process of developing effective treatments and vaccines. And our law currently lets them.

There is a better way: open science. Open science means broad, ready, equitable access to scientific knowledge, and to the data that generates that knowledge, across drugs’ and vaccines’ entire lifecycles, through the pandemic and beyond.

Open science is essential to focus research and development activity on the most crucial health needs, accelerate R&D, expand competition and prevent monopolization, reduce costs, and ensure affordable, equitable access. We must provide access to the “means, methods, and materials” of biomedical innovation, including various preclinical, clinical, and financial data that is currently kept mostly hidden by industry—and too often by government and academia, too.