Don’t Think Open Access Is Important? It Might Have Prevented Much Of The Ebola Outbreak by Mike Masnick
From the post:
For years now, we’ve been talking up the importance of open access to scientific research. Big journals like Elsevier have generally fought against this at every point, arguing that its profits are more important that some hippy dippy idea around sharing knowledge. Except, as we’ve been trying to explain, it’s that sharing of knowledge that leads to innovation and big health breakthroughs. Unfortunately, it’s often pretty difficult to come up with a concrete example of what didn’t happen because of locked up knowledge. And yet, it appears we have one new example that’s rather stunning: it looks like the worst of the Ebola outbreak from the past few months might have been avoided if key research had been open access, rather than locked up.
That, at least, appears to be the main takeaway of a recent NY Times article by the team in charge of drafting Liberia’s Ebola recovery plan. What they found was that the original detection of Ebola in Liberia was held up by incorrect “conventional wisdom” that Ebola was not present in that part of Africa:
…
Mike goes on to point out knowledge about Ebola in Liberia was published in pay-per-view medical journals, which would have been prohibitively expensive for Liberian doctors.
He has a valid point but how often do primary care physicians consult research literature? And would they have the search chops to find research from 1982?
I am very much in favor of open access but open access on its own doesn’t bring about access or meaningful use of information once accessed.