Many thanks David and all,
I look forward to read other comments in relation to our three review questions:
1. What did you like about the discussion?
2. What did you learn?
3. What could have been better?
I think the question 'Has open access to research ever saved a life' is documentable (provable) but I agree that our approach was limited by the fact that this would rarely be documented by a health professional, and we would need to rely on individuals recounting their personal experience.
Our approach (which evolved organically) included:
1. direct question to HIFA members
2. two independent queries to ChatGPT (by you and me)
3. a preliminary PubMed search
It was interesting that we were unable to identify a single specific example of a life being saved as the result of access to the full text of a research paper.
Our experience suggests that perhaps the immediate clinical value of full text to research is overestimated, contrary to the widely held belief that such access improves patient care.
That said, I think it is probable that examples do exist, but we have not yet been able to elicit them. Perhaps the question could be more widely put?
Perhaps equally (or more) important is the indirect impact of OA on the global evidence ecosystem. This ranges from its positive impact on communication and collaboration among stakeholders across the system through to the increased availability of full text to specific groups such as systematic reviewers and guideline developers. There is also, I believe, a wider societal benefit, driving transparency and openness in science.
I found it especially ineresting to consider that the potentially symbiotic relationship between OA and AI. AI is largely dependent on freely available internet content, and therefore OA content not only gets read and cited more (as Chris Zielinski notes) but is also much more likely to be integrated into AI processes.
Our findings also align with our current understanding about the information needs of health professionals, which are met primarily by synthesised and repackaged evidence (eg drug formularies, systematic reviews, clinical guidelines, textbooks, decision tools) rather than by the full text of original research.
Conversely we learned that perhaps 1 in 4 clinicians in LMICs reported that it was acceptable to base clinical decisions on an abstract, indicating there is a really important problem about how clinicians use different types of evidence. We also noted that a dange of preprints is that they can be misused or misinterpreted, deliberately or accidentally, by different users.
I look forward to other thoughts on our three questions
1. What did you like about the discussion?
2. What did you learn?
3. What could have been better?
The email address for our forum is: hifa@hifaforums.org
Best wishes, Neil
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org