Greshake Tzovaras B, Rera M, Wintermute EH, Kloppenborg K, Ferry-Danini J, et al. "Empowering grassroots innovation to accelerate biomedical research." PLOS Biology, 19(8). (2021).
This paper explores how biomedical research can be re-imagined to become more participatory, inclusive, and responsive to societal needs.
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Beyond involving the removal of post-publication barriers to research results, Open Science also faces challenges to its progress related to existing organizational hierarchies. Due to the complexities of underlying research, biomedical sciences tend to be operating based on closed access models, even though the principles of open source, e.g., Open Access to digital programming code scripts, are increasingly applied to medical drug discovery, as this paper highlights. In this respect, hierarchically structured networks may be less effective at promoting knowledge sharing and innovative solutions than open, distributed networks. Urgent patient needs may, thus, be met by bottom-up innovation frameworks and outcomes, such as open-source artificial organs. Consequently, though Open Science comprises Open Access to scholarly articles, data and methods, it potentially has wider goals and applications, such as opening up innovation circuits for grassroots projects, developing crowdfunding mechanisms for issue-response initiatives and creating frameworks for ethical, validity and safety oversight that can bring standard quality standards to bear on innovation outcomes.