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

Wed Apr 15 17:21:47 UTC 2015

I agree with Peter, there is not one solution for all. Rather many smaller and larger pieces to play somehow together – and most importantly we have very little understanding how knowledge is disseminated in a place like Liberia. Finally, the printed record is not about a short term solution, but a huge reservoir build over long time that is called altogether knowledge, not information, not data that are all part of it.

We rather should ask the question how we practically could build up respective corpora.

Donat

From: open-science [mailto:open-science-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of Peter Murray-Rust
Sent: Wednesday, April 15, 2015 7:17 PM
To: Tom Morris
Cc: Zaharevitz, Daniel (NIH/NCI) [E]; open-science
Subject: Re: [open-science] Crucially overlooked Ebola research article is paywalled at... Elsevier

On Wed, Apr 15, 2015 at 5:04 PM, Tom Morris <tfmorris at gmail.com<mailto:tfmorris at gmail.com>> wrote:

On Wed, Apr 15, 2015 at 10:11 AM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk<mailto:pm286 at cam.ac.uk>> wrote:

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.

Liberia has 51 doctors<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_in_Liberia> (ie one for every 76,000 citizens).  What would you do with the other 9,949 sticks?

Give them to teachers, local government officials, and even school children.

Do we really think that the lack of knowledge (which is different from "all the world's medical facts" BTW),

I know it's different am trying to do something about that.

was the only, or even primary, factor here?

Even if it's only a small contributory factor it's not excusable.

--
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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