In October of 2018, CRI Research organised its 4th Advanced Workshop at CRI, focusing on Open Health. During the workshop, the participants, a mix of researchers, students, educators, health professionals, policy makes and patient advocates, examined the current state-of-art as well as explored the key challenges facing the Open Health movement.
The outcome of the workshop was a jointly written paper, published this week in PLoS Computational Biology, outlining « Ten simple rules for open human health research »
The ten simple rules that we jointly defined during the workshop, while not comprehensive, offer guidance for conducting health research with human participants in an open, ethical, and rigorous manner. They present a challenge and may not be implemented all at once, but they are intended to accelerate and improve the quality of human health research. Work that fails to follow these rules is not necessarily poor quality research, especially if the reasons for breaking the rules are carefully considered and openly articulated. While most of the responsibility of following these rules falls on researchers, anyone involved in human health research in any capacity can apply them. The rules we propose are:
Rule 1: Integrate ethical principles
Rule 2: Involve nonscientists
Rule 3: Clarify roles and rewards
Rule 4: Replicate prior work
Rule 5: Make research reproducible
Rule 6: Document everything
Rule 7: Publish and present accessibly
Rule 8: Emphasize research significance
Rule 9: Advocate open principles
Rule 10: Take calculated risks
We hope that these simple rules can serve as a helpful guide to follow best practices in open human health research. More importantly, we hope that the broad community around human health research will use these as a starting point to address broken conventional practices of science and, where these rules fall short, share your own rules to improve the state of open, ethical, inclusive human health research. This is our call and challenge to all colleague working in health and related fields: be the change you seek in science and strive to make human health research a more humane, effective, and, importantly, open endeavor.
See the full paper here.