[open-science] JennyMolloy and PeterMR representing OKF at Open Science Summit

Mon Oct 31 07:39:19 UTC 2011

2011/10/30 Paweł Szczęsny <ps at pawelszczesny.org>:
> 2. It seems we have no enough data to support the scientific statement
> "OA saves lives", although we might have enough anecdotal evidence to
> back up an equivalent political statement. "Knowledge dissemination
> saves lives" is an easy one for a comparison.

Backing up claims with solid data is indeed very important. But I
would just like to reiterate here that many scientific fields work
with anecdotal evidence on a daily basis. This does not just include
social sciences like cultural anthropology, but also biology, where
about every second paper is anecdotal (bold claim by a chemist :).

And to just add my anecdotal evidence. My mother died of cancer two
years ago, purely based on misinterpretation of symptoms. Were those
symptoms properly recognized, she would have still lived. Health care
even in western countries is not taking advantage of all knowledge
there is in the field... something is failing, and Open Access is an
rather important role here.

So, it's up to the field scientist to run the experiment and show PMRs
claim is wrong... (or not).

Egon

-- 
Dr E.L. Willighagen
Postdoctoral Researcher
Institutet för miljömedicin
Karolinska Institutet (http://ki.se/imm)
Homepage: http://egonw.github.com/
LinkedIn: http://se.linkedin.com/in/egonw
Blog: http://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/
PubList: http://www.citeulike.org/user/egonw/tag/papers