The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 280 No 7489 p171
16 February 2008

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Access to publicly funded research

Academics from the London School of Economics and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine have challenged the European Commission to widen access to research findings generated using public money.

In a BMJ editorial (2008;336:287) they say that the commission’s current seven year plan — with a budget of €50.5bn, of which €6bn is allocated to health research — does little to promote access to the data whose production it finances. This contrasts with the approach of the UK’s Medical Research Council and Wellcome Trust, and that of the US National Institutes of Health, all of which expect publicly funded data to be shared.