Open Global Health

OGH is a research and advocacy group organized at OpenCon 2015 (15 November 2015) to tackle the issues of openness in Global Health..

Currently we communicate through e-mail and organize our progress on these pages.

Context and challenges

1. Open Access: Scholarly papers in global health are often locked in subscription-based journals or decentralized conference proceedings. This requires concrete policy advocacy to convince scientists and publishers to embrace open access. Furthermore, since the latest research results are firstly reported in conferences, an online public repository for such abstracts and proceedings would improve accessibility and affordability.

2. Open Research: Statistical analysis codes in global health research are rarely shared due to prominent use of proprietary software and click-and-point interfaces. We would like to bring more online and offline workshops teaching how to use free and open source software and how to write reproducible codes for global health practitioners.

3. Open Data: Patient confidentiality and national laws restrict how, with whom, and where data can shared. We respect such legal requirements and privacy concern. We seek to find alternative solutions, such as data simulation and interactive visualization, which may help improve research reproducibility and user experience.

Ideas and tasks

Focus on open access, as the first priority/project. 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
April will find out whether COS/SHARE would support this endeavor
Jeremiah proposes that abstracts and proceedings may be published in open monograph press
As suggested by Ale, we should consider the Internet Archive as an intermediate step to copy and preserve the abstracts which may no longer be available in the future
Peter and Daniel will look into copyright issues, we are concerned by legal aspects of scrapping abstracts/proceedings and assigning DOIs or such identifiers
Bastian is willing to provide some programming
Ale is, in a different context but adaptable to ours, working on mass downloading and converting ill formatted conferences (PDFs with only images and several abstracts in each page) into structured databases of text (individual abstracts with some section and authors metadata)

Focus on data processing/analysis and open research instruments. Ways to make use of the open access or well structured corpora.

Celya, who joined us through Peter, together with him is preparing a seminar on Digital methods in Health and Climate where we will explore OGH
For data processing and analysis, ContentMine is a tool that my prove very useful. They have announced a fellowship program

Once some work is done, we could talk to This Week in Global Health podcast.