Opening up knowledge in the face of a pandemic
I work, these days, in research support. The opportunities to further push back the frontiers of knowledge lie somewhat behind me. I spend time pitching opportunities at those who are still able to, facilitating those availing themselves of those opportunities and, here and there, trying to provide some evidence for how successful we might be at realising the opportunities of which we wish to avail ourselves.
As such, on a day to day basis, openness of ideas and openness of research doesn’t really factor in my activities. Any data I work with may be commercially sensitive and consequently not open. A discussion of the UK’s market driven system of higher education that this is a consequence of is probably best left for another time, but it frames the general environment within which I’ve operated for perhaps the last seven years.
Then along came COVID-19. From my perspective this hasn’t actually thrown everything into a tailspin, but it’s certainly thrown the table up into the air and dramatically changed the focus of how my team is operating. Whilst we still are responsible for keeping an eye on the bigger picture of the funding landscape, right here and right now that funding landscape is COVID-19. COVID. COVID. COVID.
And rightly so, we’ve not for many years needed to understand a threat to the human population with such urgency, and resource is being focussed where it can help to understand that threat. Consequently, for our team, a major focus now is helping to marshal an unprecedented number of research proposals around COVID-19 through internal processes and on to the funders.
Normally when a research funding application goes in, we have a good idea of who’s doing related work and where potential competitors, or inadvertent clashes may lie. Not so with COVID. There are a large number of excellent academics refocussing their gaze on this current conundrum and eager to contribute usefully to the body of knowledge that is being established at breakneck speed. How does one usefully keep on top of what’s going on, who’s doing what, and where gaps might be usefully filled?
The normal pattern of research activity goes something like this:
· Apply for funding, application peer reviewed, receive grant.
· Undertake research.
· Write up results, submit for peer reviewed publication, address reviewers’ concerns, research becomes part of the body of knowledge.
The whole process takes years, or at the very least months. Now it is condensed into weeks and days. Key to knowing what to do next is knowing what has gone before and in order to do that there has been an unprecedented shift in the way that results of biomedical research are being made known, being made open.
Usually the results of biomedical research aren’t seen until they’ve been subjected to peer review: copies of a draft manuscript are posted to unnamed peer reviewers who comment and make suggestions, or sometimes dismissing a piece of work entirely. Why? To assure the quality of research entering the corpus of knowledge. The effectiveness of this process is one that is perennially discussed and debated. I believe it’s safe to say that good peer review with well chosen reviewers is excellent and constructive, poor peer review can lead to serious problems — Andrew Wakefield’s BMJ paper falsely linking the MMR vaccination to autism would be a case in point. The hard thing is guaranteeing quality.
Getting the knowledge out there is further confounded by the mishmash of open access publishing, and that which remains guarded by £30 article access fees (or having access to a library that subscribes to the relevant journal). Publicly funded research in the UK is expected to be made open access, but commentaries and analysis of that research may not be, and research funded from other sources may not be.
Recently the biomedical world has started to adopt a process that was previously only the mainstay of those working primarily in the Physical and Mathematical Sciences. That of submitting draft manuscripts to a pre-print server prior to peer review, laying a marker down for the research and enabling others to access the work, discuss and form their own opinions. arXiv.org was established in 1991 and, at the time of writing, contains over 1.7 million articles.
bioRxiv.org and medRxiv.org for life sciences and medicine were established in 2013 and 2019 respectively. Although, for bioRxiv, there was a slow initial uptake there has been an exponential increase in the number of papers submitted.
It’s too early to say what’s happening with medRxiv, but already this outlet for knowledge has proved to be of great import in the current situation, enabling researchers to make discoveries public without having to wait for due process with the established journals. Of 5,104 articles submitted to medRxiv this year so far, 3,492 of them have been on COVID-19. Some may be good, some may be bad, but the information is out there and it has allowed open and transparent review of articles submitted.
A pertinent example would be the paper submitted to medRxiv looking at the use of hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin in the treatment of COVID-19. This publication led to hydroxychloroquine being hailed as a “game changer” by some, but beyond the headlines there were substantial misgivings being expressed very openly by numerous individuals who felt they were in a position to comment authoritatively on the research. Because of the open and rapid nature of the publishing these open commentaries were able to appear through a variety of different routes. Blogs, attached to the publication itself, and of course through twitter:
To inform research undertaken in a rapidly evolving landscape it is essential that knowledge and activity are shared rapidly and openly to avoid duplication and enable scrutiny. The transparent scrutiny by peers is often high quality, and the reader is in a position to attempt to judge whether that individual is well placed to comment authoritatively on the work that has been published. This is invaluable to researchers at this time and, indeed, myself attempting to facilitate them.
As can be seen, where this unfortunately has the risk to cause problems is when nuanced knowledge is highlighted in mainstream media and treated with broad brush strokes. I think it can be argued that this is, at this time, a necessary price to pay for the democratisation of knowledge. Seeing what were often discussions held behind closed doors being conducted in the open we all become more aware of the uncertainties inherent in research, we all become more critical thinkers, and we all become better able to make informed judgements of the information presented to us.
Without moving towards more open knowledge we will maintain a view of things being black and white and immutable with no shades of grey in between. In the current climate that is arguably a dangerous place to be.
