To support 2021’s International Open Access Week, Pfizer commissioned Inspiring STEM Consulting to record a series of podcast interviews with experts working within clinical and medical disciplines. The objective was to share perspectives on the real-world impact and benefit of open science for patients and key stakeholders.
Open science can be best defined as the practice of freely sharing clinical and scientific knowledge in a way that allows others to collaborate and build upon that knowledge to accelerate research applications. Within this open science ecosystem, clinical data sharing and data transparency continue to advance. Many national and international organizations, such as the National Institutes of Health and the UK’s Medical Research Council, are adopting open data policies.
The premise of open science is that research will progress faster if data and knowledge are openly shared, with the caveat of proper safety measures and ethical frameworks. This has been most evident during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. But despite significant progress, open science principles and practices still need to be more formally embedded within clinical research institutions and organizations.
The following five podcasts, hosted by Martin Delahunty, are presented:
Joseph Ross – Open Science and data sharing in clinical research
Ross is Professor of Medicine and of Public Health at the Yale New Haven Hospital. He co-directs the Yale University-Mayo Clinic Center of Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation, the Yale Open Data Access Project, the Collaboration for Research Integrity and Transparency at Yale Law School, and leads efforts at Yale New Haven Health System in collaboration with the National Evaluation System for health Technology. Dr Ross is also currently the US Outreach and Research Editor at the BMJ.
Lonni Besançon – Open science saves lives: lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic
Dr Besançon is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Computer Science Engineer at Monash University. His main focus lies on the intersection between human–computer interaction and interactive scientific visualization.
Joana Osório – Open Pharma: driving positive change in the communication of pharma-sponsored research
Dr Osório is a Communications Consultant at Oxford PharmaGenesis, working on patient engagement projects and Open Pharma, a collaboration that aims to increase transparency and access to pharma-sponsored research outputs.
Akhil Bansal – Open access and global health inequity: a clinical perspective
Dr Bansal is a medical doctor and a Policy and Research Analyst at Charity Entrepreneurship, a social venture capital that incubates and creates strategies for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in the global health and health policy sectors. Most of the company’s work is in low-income countries, where access to scientific and health information is a problem. It is working on incubating NGOs that seek to promote open development and access to science, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. Dr Bansal was previously a Medical Writer at Oxford PharmaGenesis.
Guy Rouleau – Open Science to accelerate discovery and deliver cures: a research hospital’s perspective
Dr Rouleau is Director of the Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital (The Neuro), Chair of the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery of McGill University and Director of the Department of Neuroscience of McGill University Health Center. As co‐founder of the Tanenbaum Open Science Institute, he is pioneering a new way of doing research by transforming The Neuro into the first academic institution to adopt open science principles to accelerate discovery and benefit patients and society.
Martin Delahunty is Founder and Managing Director of Inspiring STEM Consulting, providing publishing and training services to publishers, universities and pharmaceutical companies, focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics. He is a former Secretary for the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals and Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (London). Disclosure: Inspiring STEM Consulting Limited received funding from Pfizer. None of the podcast participants received funding or were contracted to speak. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
