Open Access - Open Everything

Richard Gallagher has a nice piece in the latest Scientist about the joys and benefits not only of Open Access to information and knowledge, but Open Review for scientific articles. Its great to see an organisation that is wholly focused on the creation and application of knowledge, being so ready to experiment positively with the idea that knowledge works best when the most possible eyeballs can see it. The British Medical Journal gets a truckload of kudos for Above and Beyond Open Access

On Feb. 28, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published an article entitled, "Where Is The Evidence That Animal Research Benefits Humans?" The paper purported to demonstrate that "Much animal research into potential treatments for humans is wasted because it is poorly conducted and not evaluated through systematic reviews." Unsurprisingly, the article attracted much media attention, with headlines screaming, "Experiments On Animals Should End, Say Doctors" and "Animal Tests Poorly Conducted!" The findings are said to have boosted animal rights groups.

However, after a number of weeks of discussion, the question that the title asks now can be definitively answered, and the criticisms the paper raises, addressed. This has been made possible by the enlightened publishing practices of the BMJ. This journal has led the way in providing free, online access to the full text of all research articles. So anyone with an interest can assess any article in its full glory, rather than relying on brief press reports.

A second BMJ innovation is positively demiurgic: the editor publishes "Rapid Responses" to the journal's papers. These are letters from all sources, screened only for libel and breaches of patient confidentiality.

While I write this, 17 Rapid Responses are online.2 These include a number of invocations of animal's rights ("A Plea for Mercy" and "Animals Matter, Too"), and a provocative stance from a journalist ("Perverse Logic") that got rubbished in the most ruthless fashion ("Journalists Shouldn't Think in Black or White"). Entertaining stuff. More importantly, the respondents provide a barbed and penetrating critique of the study.

The technical comments rained down from senior researchers and clinicians, even from the Chief Executive of the UK Medical Research Council. But the most succinct and damning remarks came from a graduate student ("Where is the Evidence It Doesn't?") who wrote: "... Most of the systematic reviews of animal models in this article were prompted by unsuccessful clinical trials in humans. The remainder appears to have been prompted directly by inconsistency between animal models and clinical data. This suggests a publication bias in systematic reviews of animal models ... which renders the conclusions reached in the paper invalid. ... animal models in those fields which lead to unsuccessful clinical trials or inconsistency are of poor quality but the findings cannot generalize to all animal models."

With BMJ, we have more than open access; we have open review. This method achieves a critiquing level that is not possible with just peer review, publication and subsequent media coverage. It is surely in all our interests for the BMJ model to be widely adopted by other journals that publish research that is of immediate public interest.

I think scientists will quickly become very used to this way of working, and what we will see is much more collaboration and participation because, in the end, good scientists want answers to questions and this way gets there faster and more efficiently. If almost everyone is doing it this way, those who hold their cards close to their chests will be seen as aberrant at best and a little weird at worst. And to be weird among the idiosyncracies of scientists will make you odd indeed.

Wikis will become the tools of academic publication, funding models will adapt to the new environment and many eyeballs will make more and more problems increasingly shallow.

I love especially the fact that a graduate student can participate at any level on which they are able to defend their ideas. That a student can cogently and clearly deconstruct the logical propblems behind a question, do it in public and be judged not on their position in the hierarchy but their ability to argue a case, is a very hopeful sign.

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