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

Wed Apr 15 14:11:28 UTC 2015

On Wed, Apr 15, 2015 at 2:53 PM, Zaharevitz, Daniel (NIH/NCI) [E] <
Daniel.Zaharevitz at nih.gov> wrote:

> I agree with a lot more of what Peter said, but I wanted to highlight
> this. The large sum of money paid to publishers is a small fraction of the
> money (largely public) that is spent on biological research.

I've been trying to get some idea of the public funding on medical and
scientific research. I have calculated that it's about 500 Billion USD per
year. It's probably within 300-1000 billion).

The Lancet published some years ago that 85% of medical research was wasted
through non-publication, closed publication, duplication, poor design, etc.
I make the political statement that Open would have prevented much of this.
Perhaps 100 billion USD/year - who knows. The precise figure is irrelevant.
I also - as a human - believe in my heart that this waste has led to poorer
medical practice, poorer medical thought, poorer involvement of patients in
their own disease, poorer public health. I can't "scientifically prove it".

But here's a testable, cheap, scientific experiment.
put all the world's medical facts onto 10000 memory sticks (or mobile
phones, or Raspberry Pis, or whatever) and send them to an anglophone West
African country (because the literature is in English). Monitor reported
health outcomes after 10 years. Compare with a neighbouring country which
didn't have the memory sticks.

It might cost a million dollars.

Prediction. There would be no effect.
Why? because the memory sticks would have been copied by doctors,
local/central government in the other country. Because the knowledge is
valuable.

But of course we can't do this experiment because we'll be sued.

P.

But we are going to do as much of it as we can with what we are legally
allowed to do.

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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