Open Global Health/1st meeting
The first Open Global Health meeting took place on 15 November 2015, in Brussels, during OpenCon 2015.
Description[edit | edit source]
While global health involves large data to infer population-level behaviors and to inform policy makers, we are less inclined to share the underlying data due to patient confidentiality, national laws, and data novelty. Complex relationships with donors and legal requirements to keep critical patient data within a given country require novel ways to make global health research more evidence-driven, reproducible, and transparent. Realizing this goal requires developing simulation/anonymization tools, enabling easy implementation of interactive visualization, and advocating policy changes. This session invites health professionals, biostatistician, policy makers, and to discuss how to implement and advance OpenGlobalHealth. After OpenCon, the group of interested participants would continue collaborating on these topics and advocating open data and open research in global health.
Notes[edit | edit source]
Neo: Open Data is a very difficult field in connection with Open Global Health. Global Health is not at the same level as statistics, genomics and so on. We have to educate the global health practicioner on Open Education. Global health publications should be Open Access. We should talk about building a repository with focus on global health.
Jeremiah: Perhaps Sparc Africa should host a repository for global health.
Peter: At other conferences, they talk about the big picture. People in the 3rd world get wrong medication based on old information.
Ansam: What’s standing in the way of Open Global Health?
April: Lots of reasons. People who are not going to be career researchers won’t care about open. We need to make it really easy for them.
Peter: There’s a bunch of problems. Example of Ebola: Publishers only accepted to open up their data bases for a few months.
Jeremiah: There are researchers who are passionate about open. Example: Open textbook was published but no one uses it in Africa, downloads are from Europe and North America. It’s an infrastructure problem but also the way to find it.
Neo: A lot of medical professionals have no incentives to publish in OA journals. Conference proceedings and abstracts are difficult to track. Librarians play a key role here.
April: There’s a database www.share-research.org
Jeremiah: An easy way would be to start a journal.
Neo: We need to have an incentive to share. The biggest conference on HIV is called CROI. Their website is awful and you can’t find the abstracts any more after one year. There are conferences which are the best, but you can’t find even the abstracts after a certain amount of time.
April: You can go to share-research.org and tell them that they should add data.
Jeremiah: They only collect metadata. I would propose either using or publish the abstracts or proceedings in open monograph press (https://pkp.sfu.ca/omp/).
Neo: We should collaborate with RIO (http://riojournal.com/). I will talk to my former advisor. Convincing CROI will be hard. We should be open to the idea to just scrape the data.
April: We have to find out what the copyright situation is concerning the abstracts for CROI.
Ale: We should also check if archive.org copies the abstracts.
Neo: That’s not sustainable, we need also DOI and ORCID with each individual archive. You don’t have to be the owner of a document to get a DOI for a document.
Peter: I will look at it on a big scale. I gonna take the lead for this. What about the cochrane reviews?
April: They’re not open yet, but they are on board.
Bastian: Keep me in the look, I can do some programming.
Outcomes[edit | edit source]
We decided to focus on open access, as the first priority/project. We discussed ways to link and preserve abstracts and proceedings from global health conferences. Ideally, we would like to provide DOIs and ORCIDs. Collaboration with existing open access journals or academic repositories would be preferable; Neo will talk to Daniel Mietchen of RIO (http://riojournal.com/) and April will find out whether COS/SHARE (http://www.share-research.org) would support this endeavor. Jeremiah proposes that abstracts and proceedings may be published in open monograph press (https://pkp.sfu.ca/omp/). As suggested by Ale, we should consider the Internet Archive (https://archive.org) as an intermediate step to copy and preserve the abstracts which may no longer be available in the future. Because we are concerned by legal aspects of scrapping abstracts/proceedings and assigning DOIs (or such identifiers), Peter and Daniel will look into the copyright issues. Bastian is willing to provide some programming.
Organization[edit | edit source]
Neo and Jeremiah take the lead for Open Global Health! jeremiahpietersen@hotmail.com, nchchung@gmail.com
April, Ansam, Ale, Bastian, Daniel and Peter want to be kept in the loop. april.clyburne.sherin@gmail.com, ansam.sinjab@gmail.com, abdo@member.fsf.org, greshake@gmail.com, huerlimann.daniel@swissonline.ch, peter.grabitz@charite.de