Open science initiatives: challenges for public health promotion

Abstract

While academic open access, open data and open science initiatives have proliferated in recent years, facilitating new research resources for health promotion, open initiatives are not one-size-fits-all. Health research particularly illustrates how open initiatives may serve various interests and ends. Open initiatives not only foster new pathways of research access; they also discipline research in new ways, especially when associated with new regimes of research use and peer review, while participating in innovation ecosystems that often perpetuate existing systemic biases toward commercial biomedicine. Currently, many open initiatives are more oriented toward biomedical research paradigms than paradigms associated with public health promotion, such as social determinants of health research. Moreover, open initiatives too often dovetail with, rather than challenge, neoliberal policy paradigms. Such initiatives are unlikely to transform existing health research landscapes and redress health inequities. In this context, attunement to social determinants of health research and community-based local knowledge is vital to orient open initiatives toward public health promotion and health equity. Such an approach calls for discourses, norms and innovation ecosystems that contest neoliberal policy frameworks and foster upstream interventions to promote health, beyond biomedical paradigms. This analysis highlights challenges and possibilities for leveraging open initiatives on behalf of a wider range of health research stakeholders, while emphasizing public health promotion, health equity and social justice as benchmarks of transformation.

Dynamics of cumulative advantage and threats to equity in open science: a scoping review

“…This asymmetry in favour of industry can in turn can be seen as an endorsement within Open Science of the marketization of science and the specific neoliberal vision of the academy which underlies it (cf. [ 214 ]).…”

“…Participatory research is directed by a self-reflexive, critical, ethics-focused approach to research design, conduct, distribution of labour [204] and financial benefits [204][205][206], outputs and impacts [205][206][207][208][209]. Questions of equality, justice and equity are often centred [202,206,208,[210][211][212] and the knowledge produced reflects the lived experience and situated expertise of the participants and communities upon which the research is focused [202,203,213,214]. Further, those that participate in Citizen Science and participatory projects develop scientific expertise that would otherwise be unavailable to them, making them more effective democratic actors who are able to challenge policies, civic expertise and corporate power in pursuit of justice and equality [202,208,211,[215][216][217][218][219].…”

Dynamics of Cumulative Advantage and Threats to Equity in Open Science - A Scoping Review

“…Participatory research is directed by a self-reflexive, critical, ethics-focused approach to research design, conduct, distribution of labour [206] and financial benefits [206][207][208], outputs and impacts [207][208][209][210][211]. Questions of equality, justice and equity are often centred [204,208,210,[212][213][214] and the knowledge produced reflects the lived experience and situated expertise of the participants and communities upon which the research is focused [204,205,215,216]. Further, those that participate in Citizen Science and participatory projects develop scientific expertise that would otherwise be unavailable to them, making them more effective democratic actors who are able to challenge policies, civic expertise, and corporate power in pursuit of justice and equality [204,210,213,[217][218][219][220][221].…”

Machine learning hypothesis-generation for patient stratification and target discovery in rare disease: our experience with Open Science in ALS

“…The benefits of Open Science are well documented, and it is crucial that researchers are properly equipped with the knowledge and skills required to navigate an Open Science landscape ( Zečević et al, 2020 ). It has become evident that Open Science will play an essential role in addressing health inequity, improving patient engagement, and treatment access for all patients ( Holzmeyer, 2019 ; Norori et al, 2021 ). However, this requires increasing awareness of the power of Open Science and a collaborative effort to reduce the barriers that will enable better engagement in Open Science activities.…”