Whose rights and who's right?

doi:10.1136/bmj.b1499

Published 14 April 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b1499
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;338:b1499

Letters

Sharing medical research data

Whose rights and who’s right?

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The moral tone of Groves’ editorial—research ispublicly funded; fellow scientists and citizens have a "right"to access "raw numbers, analyses, facts, ideas, and images";some naughty researchers are colluding with industry to "keepthe data hidden away"—was inappropriate.¹

Firstly, an increasing number of journal editors are makingnaive assumptions about the nature of research knowledge. Aproportion of such knowledge—for example, in basic sciences—canlegitimately be treated as "facts" or "raw numbers" that canbe extracted from their context and analysed unproblematicallyby others at some future date. But the data behind most BMJpapers (broadly, health services research) is not so cleanlycleaved from the context in which it was collected or the peoplewho supplied it and interpreted it. There is an important literatureon the lack of transferability of knowledge between communitieseven in the basic sciences.² ³ The problem increases as theunit of analysis moves . . . [Full text of this article]