When one of my kids was about six, a friend spent a day teaching him how to ski. At the end of the afternoon she took him to the top of a short but steep hill and assured him he could now ski down it. He looked down the hill then up at her and asked, “But why?”
So as we look at open-meta mountain, realizing this is going to be a challenging gradual climb, not a quick swish, let’s ask the same question.
Open-meta is a demonstration project I’m doing for a dissertation. I’m working on a doctoral degree in Health Education. My proposal for this project begins:
A best practice for health research is the systematic review and meta-analysis. Health educators would benefit from an open platform for continuous online updating and replication of systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Like Wikipedia, such a tool would crowdsource the discovery and results-entry of health-related randomized controlled trials. It would provide health educators with a database of randomized controlled trials (that is, with an already-completed systematic review) and tools for instant meta-analysis. A similar online tool, called www.aidgrade.org, is available now for those who work in international development.
The complete 36-page proposal for this project is here.