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It's about the EMBASE screening project. In this project volunteers offered their time/skills to identify RCTs in EMBASE. I asked if this list of trials could be shared - given it was powered by volunteers.

The answer was 'no'! 

Some feel this is fine others feel it's inappropriate for two reasons (1) It's not really in keeping with the crowdsourcing ethos (2) it was not made explicit to the volunteers that their efforts would be used exclusively for Cochrane's profit/benefit

On 9 May 2016, at 17:00, Barry Diner <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Just getting to this feed know.

Think I missed original email.

What is Cochrane planning on charging for

Barry Diner, MD,MPH, FACEP
Baylor College of Medicine

On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 10:44 AM, Susan Fowler <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Hi Jon: 

Have you heard from anyone who served as a volunteer on the screening project? 

Thanks. 

On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 8:58 AM, Jon Brassey <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Ben,

Since my initial message a couple of volunteers have responded on the list expressing disquiet/surprise at Cochrane's position.  I have also been contacted, off list, by a number more.  All seem upset by Cochrane's maneuvering on this.  None explicitly knew Cochrane would make this a private resource.

You raise an interesting point around the long-term harm of this.  I'm sceptical it'll harm crowdsourcing per se.  However, it might limit Cochrane's ability to repeat this trick in the future.

As I initially stated, if Cochrane reverse their decision and put make volunteers efforts publicly and freely available (as the volunteers intended) I'll be a massive fan of their efforts.

Cheers

jon

On 9 May 2016 at 14:50, Ben Goldacre <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Cochrane needs to be sustainable, that's in everyone's interests. 

The questions are:

1. Cochrane is trying to monetise the underlying data collected by individual researchers and now members of the public (as well as the published reviews): are the benefits of this greater than the harms?

2. Were members of the public participating in the crowdsourcing project told that their time and effort would create a paywalled commercial dataset that is not shared? 

The latter is a consent issue, and also raises broader concerns, because generally that kind of crowdsourcing information effort is to produce an open data resource for public good, eg Wikipedia and more. 

What were the participants told? I can't see anything on the site telling them that their crowdsourcing work would produce a private resource: I may have missed it, but if so then it is possible/likely they may have missed it too.  

What were they told?






Dr Ben Goldacre BA MA MSc MBBS MRCPsych

 Senior Clinical Research Fellow

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On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 2:35 PM, Susan Fowler <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
No. I said nothing is free. 

-- 
Susan Fowler, MLIS
Medical Librarian
Coordinator, Systematic Review Services

Evidence at Becker:
http://beckerguides.wustl.edu/ebm

Systematic Reviews Guide:
http://beckerguides.wustl.edu/SystematicReviews

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On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 3:04 PM, vasiliy vlassov <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Dear Susan,
did I understand you correctly that you are saying:
because every body has its means of living (someone paying them an income), just because of this, the fruits of his/her (crowd of them) work may be used by third party for the profit?
Vasya


On 2016-05-05 16:45, Susan Fowler wrote:
Cochrane is not really free to anyone. In countries where people have
"free" access including Australia, they have it because their government
pays for it with taxes paid by citizens. Just like how the PubMed
interface to the Medline database isn't really "free" since it is paid
for with United States citizen tax dollars.Crowd sourcing isn't free
either. That crowd is already an elite set of people since they have
access to the internet and the hardware necessary to interact. Those
people are employed by someone paying them an income  or are supported
by their government that supports their crowd sourcing contributions.

Researchers are welcome to publish their content in reputable open
source journals like PLOS and their institutions are happy to make their
content digitally available in repositories. In the US, journals
publishing reports funded with government money are required to make
access to those reports free. We have plenty of avenues for sharing our
content. We do not have to give up access and, these days, authors have
options to negotiate author agreements with subscription journals to
maintain access rights. If you need help figuring all of that out
contact a librarian.

If you want access to information for "free", it doesn't stop with
university libraries, you can access content at your public libraries as
well. You can even do it online with a "free" public library account.
Even if your public library doesn't subscribe to a particular journal
they can get it for you, usually at not cost to you outside of the taxes
you have already paid to use the library in the first place.

So when people complain about not having free access what are they
really complaining about? Because from my point of view, it seems like
there a lot of ways to access information for "free". If researchers get
paid to conduct research and write articles reporting the results, who
do we think pays the publishers to publish that content or the libraries
and librarians who work very hard to make access as easy as possible?

I don't think Cochrane is aiming to derive financial gains either but
Cochrane doesn't just happen. Their are servers, content management,
interface design etc... that has to happen and that is not free. Nothing
is really free.


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Susan Fowler, MLIS
Medical Librarian
Coordinator, Systematic Review Services
...















Vasiliy V. Vlassov, MD
President, Society for Evidence Based Medicine (osdm.org)
e-mail: vlassov[a t]cochrane.ru
snail mail: P.O.Box 13 Moscow 109451 Russia
Phone Russia +7(965)2511021

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--
Susan Fowler, MLIS
Medical Librarian
Coordinator, Systematic Review Services

Evidence at Becker:
http://beckerguides.wustl.edu/ebm

Systematic Reviews Guide:
http://beckerguides.wustl.edu/SystematicReviews

Becker Medical Library, Washington University in St. Louis
314-362-8092
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