The Department of Continuing Education at Oxford University offers an interesting range of short courses on Evidence-Based Health Care. They had a recent call for feedback on a new course that they would like to offer on Research Integrity and Open Science.
The topics that they plan to cover in the course include many that I have talked out on these web pages. They asked for feedback in a survey. It is mostly, I suspect, an effort to identify students for this class. But I took the survey and made a bold pitch to be a speaker. I don’t think this will be successful, but you have to try. Here is what I wrote.
To the question “Are there any speakers you would like to see invited on this module? Do you have any contacts/suggestions for these?”
At the risk of sounding arrogant, I myself would be a good speaker. I have written a lot informally about data sharing, data documentation, and open source publishing. I have written up multiple case studies in research fraud, data privacy, and conflicts of interest. Some of my work was published on a Wiki site, Chance News, which unfortunately seems to have fallen off the Internet. But you can get a rough idea of the topics by the titles of my contributions. I also have pages on my own website about data sharing, conflict of interest, open source, reproducible research, and many others. My website is in transition, so many of the pages are broken, but you can get a rough idea of what I have written about. Half of my pages are original content and half are links to other interesting websites and journal articles.
I would be thrilled to get a chance to speak more about this topic. I am also willing to work behind the scenes, reviewing materials produced by others.
To the question “Are there any case studies that you would like to examine in more depth within the module?”
The Netflix data competition is a nice introduction to data privacy.
The Reinhart-Rogoff Excel error is a cautionary tale about reproducibility.
The investigations of Keith Baggerly and Kevin Coombes into the Duke University scandal
The Wellcome Trust statement on data sharing during the Covid-19 crisis