[open-science] Crucially overlooked Ebola research article is paywalled at... Elsevier

[Peter Murray-Rust]

The key point is that it's not ME, but the Liberian Ministry of Health that
is stating that the closed access was (at least partially) responsible for
the information not being available.


On 15 April 2015 at 12:12, Paweł Szczęsny <ps at pawelszczesny.org> wrote:
>
>> Ross and others,
>>
>> As this happens again, I will reiterate my previous arguments:
>>
>> 1. You have no hard data showing that "closed access kills". The whole
>> Ebola story is more like "search failure", "no liberian scientists
>> were coauthors", etc than "closed access" per se (the article you cite
>> is easy to find using Google Scholar). Unless you factor other things
>> in, back it by rigorous research, the statement is unscientific.
>>
>> It's the Liberian Ministry who is making this argument. I support them in
this. As I have said before this is NOT a scientific statement , it's a
political one. I believe that lack of medical information means people die.
There published material to back this up (and Jenny Molloy published it
here ca 5 years ago).

It is actually unethical to try to prove this statement scientifically. You
would have to deliberately withhold information from groups of people. But,
as the Liberians say:

There is an adage in public health: “The road to inaction is paved with
research papers.”

And I would say that trying to make political statements scientifically
valid falls into the same trap.

2. Lots of people around the world are working hard on introduction of
>> science-based policies into the way governments are run. Sometimes
>> it's working - for example, Europan Comission's unit on Open Access
>> has an evidence-based protocol in use to assess the real impact of OA
>> (at least that's what I was told).
>>
>> 3. By repeating unscientific statements, you are making the community
>> fragile to publishers' lobbyist (and any other that has a need to
>> attack science) that can state to governmental officials: "Look, these
>> scientists cannot even make a proper study on impact of closed access.
>> The truth is that ... ".
>>
>
I am a human being  as well as a scientist. People are dying. I have lived
for two years in West Africa. I want to help. I believe that by promoting
this issue I can make a very small difference, so I'm doing this.

Yes, it's an emotional statement. So are most statements advocating for
rights.


>
>> 4. It undermines the credibility of research community. Credibility
>> that I think is needed to advance both open science, and science-based
>> policy making as a whole.
>>
>> Please, stop. Or better, make a research showing that "closed access
>> kills". I believe that indeed there's an effect to measure and show
>> (although that it smaller than other factors), but that doesn't mean I
>
> can use my "belief" as an argument in public debate.
>>
>
We respect each other but we clearly differ on this point.

I believe that what is needed is more communal determination to solve this
problem. It's a system failure of the academic-publisher complex.

Look at it this way. We have spent 100 BILLION dollars over the last ten
year in paying publishers to create material that less than 1 percent of
the world can read. You can say that we are making steady progress, or -
like me - you can question the fundamentals.

Despite massive spending we have failed to get medical knowledge to the
people who need it - on a massive scale. The global south and patients
everywhere. It's technically possible to get every medical paper ever
published onto a memory stick and get it out to the Liberians, the
SierraLeonians, The Ghanaians, etc. Every doctor could have the whole
literature.

In contentmine.org we are doing that. We are collecting all the literature.
We are going to make the Open components widely available. But, of course,
we can't give the West Africans this 32-year old paper because Elsevier
would take us to court. (Despite the fact they said they'd make Ebola
papers free, they haven't).

If we had the whole of the medical literature then content mine tools could
detect this paper. Selecetv "Ebola" and ask what countries it has been
reported in and you'd find this paper; select "Liberia" and ask what
epidemic diseases have been reported and you'd find it. Put that knowledge
in the hands of 10000 West Africans and someone will ask questions like
this.

Until that happens there will be preventable deaths.


-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-science/attachments/20150415/f574e3fd/attachment-0003.html>