Open Access News

Open Medicine is an open access journal because we believe that free and timely access to research results allows scientific knowledge to be used by all those who need it, not just those who can afford expensive journal subscriptions or user fees for individual articles. But is access to the final polished version of research enough? Could we do more to en­courage the collaborative reuse and reanalysis of existing data, or the verification of analyses? Could we move from open access to open science? ...

What kinds of advantages would an initiative like data-sharing offer? For a start, data-sharing opens opportunities for the creative reanalysis of data. Most researchers have had the experience of working single-mindedly with neither the inspiration nor the time to explore alternative ways to look at their data. Sharing data with other researchers with different research expertise may give rise to new insights, validated findings, or supported and strengthened conclusions. A changing attitude to transparency in research also supports data-sharing: encouraging openness in science promotes integrity, reduces the potential for scientific fraud, and fosters public faith in scientific endeavour. ...

It could also be argued that there is an ethical obligation to patients and funding agencies (and to taxpayers) with a stake in scientific research to maximize the benefit to study subjects, who often participate at some personal risk, and to put to best use the money spent on research. These are also opportunity costs to consider: the human subjects who might have volunteered for a different trial, and the funding that could have been spent elsewhere, on other research or on health services. Thus, the limitations on resources provide another good reason for data-sharing. ...

Open Medicine is following the lead of PLoS Medicine and the re­producible research policy of the Annals of Internal Medicine. Although the latter was initiated to support research integrity, it also supports a broader data-shar­ing agenda. We now ask authors to indicate their will­ingness to share their protocols, datasets, and the statis­tical codes used for their analysis with other authors, and we encourage authors who publish secondary analy­ses to use the same Creative Commons license that we use. Open Medicine will not handle datasets and other such material directly, but by publishing our authors’ willingness to share their original data we hope to encourage fruitful collaboration.Authors who do not choose to submit these data will not be penalized: we recognize that the acceptance of data-sharing needs time to grow and develop in the scientific community, and we welcome debate and dialogue as we develop our policy on data-sharing. We also need to find ways to deal with some of the problems of data-sharing, such as how to notify other researchers (or computers that are data-mining) about problems with the data (e.g., in its collection, biases, potential confounders.) and ways to manage original datasets in large databases. Data security, managing data requests and monitoring their appropriate use are other issues that need attention. Perhaps institutions will begin to archive original datasets in the same way that they are beginning to archive their researchers’ publications? Google has recently started) to help researchers exchange very large datasets (up to 120 terabytes) at no charge provided that the data have no copyright or licensing restrictions. These sorts of options could be more ef­ficient than multiple journals developing their own data repositories.

However its ways and means evolve, an inexorable drive to make science truly open is clear. Indeed, we believe the debate isn’t about whetherwe will share data in the future but, rather, about how we will share it. ...