Don’t Think Open Access Is Important? It Might Have Prevented Much Of The Ebola Outbreak

For years now, we've been talking up the importance of open access to scientific research. Big journals like Elsevier have generally fought against this at every point, arguing that its profits are more important that some hippy dippy idea around sharing knowledge. Except, as we've been trying to explain, it's that sharing of knowledge that leads to innovation and big health breakthroughs. Unfortunately, it's often pretty difficult to come up with a concrete example of what didn't happen because of locked up knowledge. And yet, it appears we have one new example that's rather stunning: it looks like the worst of the Ebola outbreak from the past few months might have been avoided if key research had been open access, rather than locked up.

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