Open Global Health/1st meeting

The first Open Global Health meeting took place on 15 November 2015, in Brussels, during OpenCon 2015.

Description
While global health involves large data to infer population-level behaviors and to inform policy makers, we are less inclined to share the underlying data due to patient confidentiality, national laws, and data novelty. Complex relationships with donors and legal requirements to keep critical patient data within a given country require novel ways to make global health research more evidence-driven, reproducible, and transparent. Realizing this goal requires developing simulation/anonymization tools, enabling easy implementation of interactive visualization, and advocating policy changes. This session invites health professionals, biostatistician, policy makers, and to discuss how to implement and advance OpenGlobalHealth. After OpenCon, the group of interested participants would continue collaborating on these topics and advocating open data and open research in global health.

Outcomes
We decided to focus on open access, as the first priority/project. We discussed ways to link and preserve abstracts and proceedings from global health conferences. Ideally, we would like to provide DOIs and ORCIDs. Collaboration with existing open access journals or academic repositories would be preferable; Neo will talk to Daniel Mietchen of RIO (http://riojournal.com/) and April will find out whether COS/SHARE (http://www.share-research.org) would support this endeavor. Jeremiah proposes that abstracts and proceedings may be published in open monograph press (https://pkp.sfu.ca/omp/). As suggested by Ale, we should consider the Internet Archive (https://archive.org) as an intermediate step to copy and preserve the abstracts which may no longer be available in the future. Because we are concerned by legal aspects of scrapping abstracts/proceedings and assigning DOIs (or such identifiers), Peter and Daniel will look into the copyright issues. Bastian is willing to provide some programming.

Organization
Neo and Jeremiah take the lead for Open Global Health! jeremiahpietersen@hotmail.com, nchchung@gmail.com

April, Ansam, Ale, Bastian, Daniel and Peter want to be kept in the loop. april.clyburne.sherin@gmail.com, ansam.sinjab@gmail.com, abdo@member.fsf.org, greshake@gmail.com, huerlimann.daniel@swissonline.ch, peter.grabitz@charite.de