Providing public health and medical information to all
This session is moderated by Martin Fenner:
Nowhere is Open Access as important as in the areas of medicine and public health. Health care professional and patients alike are not likely to have access to libraries of elite universities – they may work in hospitals, at small schools or in the field including in the developing world. What is being done and what more can be done to ensure that everyone everywhere has access to life-saving medical information.
But access to medical research is only part of it. Motivation and filtering are two other factors that have particular importance when you talk about medical research. A broader title of the session would therefore be reporting medical research: specific problems and specific solutions. And we have a number of interesting topics to cover in the session.
Motivation
- Betroffenheit – for patients and their friends and relatives information about medical research becomes an urgent need
- Financial interests – they have great influence on what research projects are done and what gets published
Access
- Open access – only a minority of medical research papers are available as fulltext to those without institutional access
- Clinical trials – there is mandatory registration of all clinical trials since 2005 and this information is publicly available
Filtering
- Evidence-based medicine – a set of rules to judge the quality of a clinical research paper
- Science journalism – often unable to filter important and interesting medical research
- Science blogging – a great but underused tool for evaluating medical research
- Direct to consumer advertising – a controversial way of providing information about medical research
