15 January 2013

Horton Tweets Code of Conduct for Ethical Research Publication

Lancet Editor Richard Horton sent a series of tweets outlining what he called a Code of Conduct for Research Publication while listening to Rwandan Minister of Health Agnes Binagwaho at the Global Maternal Health Conference 2013 in Tanzania.

2 comments:

Ian Thorpe said...

Hi Tom

This is an interesting list - but I'm not fully convinced. On the one hand it might go too far but in others not far enough.

On 1. while it's highly desirable to include local authors, and certainly to give credit to local contributors to research I don't think this should be a "must have" for research to be approved just so people can get published since it could lead to tokenism of the worst sort. To draw a parallel, I've lived in the US now for 15 years but don't have a green card - does this mean I can't publish research about the US unless I get a "real american" to co-author with me?

On the other hand while I agree with that research should be "free at point of use" - what does that mean in practice? Lot of research - including that in Horton's Lancet is still behind an expensive paywall - does he mean that they will now open that up "as long as you are going to use it" i.e. rather than just read it. In terms of ideas for open research I think I prefer some of the suggestions from Owen Barder's recent post about the death of Aaron Swartz http://blogs.cgdev.org/globaldevelopment/2013/01/development-and-the-death-of-aaron-swartz.php i.e. aid budgets and public fuinding should only be given to research that is freely available and data that is open and peer-reviewers should only review for open access journals (North or South).

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