VictorVenema

I am a fan of Open Science, think it is the future. I moderate the open science subreddit, but I wonder whether we have clear evidence that "Open Science Saves Lives", as the title of your article claims?

More broadly, I think Open Science helps scientific progress, but I do not think we have hard evidence for it. For me this is just intuition. We had science and scientific progress before the open science movement was build. Do you know of any strong evidence? We do not have a counter factual in most cases. Randomized trails are rare and the ones I know do not find any influence.

Not on the AMA team, but I have a blog post on this. From 2013, before preprints were hot, but we already had blogs, mailing lists, op-eds and press releases and conferences made before the paper was finished.

Peer review is not a perfect filter with reliable science coming out. It gives a paper some initial credibility. With science opening up we will get more cases where a journalist will feel his readers are interested in a finding before it is officially published. Journalists and scientists should show restraint and be very careful in communicating how credible the science is. But it is impossible to require them to wait for peer review in every case. If only because also the media is opening up and cannot gate keep. http://variable-variability.blogspot.com/2013/04/value-peer-review-science-press.html

Okay, I should have asked whether the title implied a significant increase in the number of deaths. We have over a million deaths from COVID-19.

We still do not have a counter factual. In the real case these requirements would not only go for the HCQ paper,but then for all (COVID) papers. Would the review take months, like it normally does, we would also have the vaccine months later. That is few 100,000 dead people. Sharing data takes time. Sharing data makes the incentive to generate data less, thus we might have less data.

For me, not even having any expertise, it was clear from the start that the HCQ study was shaky, but people were desperate. They used it before the study. Would they have used it less if the protocol were available?

i think it is evident during this pandemic that trust in both is eroding—as your paper shows, with good reason.

I do not think this is evident. Do you have a source for this claim?

One of the strategies of the people fighting enlightenment values is "impossible expectations". No study ever being allowed to be wrong is one of those. The reliability of science is in the long-term consensus of scientists, what goes into the textbooks. Science does not claim that when we work on the edge of what is knowable every contribution is perfect from the start.

I am climate scientist and know of the problems in the USA and their atrocious media system and of the denial of reality by the far-right elsewhere when it helps kill people they hate

But in case of climate change a growing fraction of the population in America accepts the science. In Germany a huge part of the population is listing to a podcast with a virologist, Christian Drosten, who if he makes it a bit more complicated would start losing me although I am scientist. People want to know everything. When science produces a vaccine people cheer, when politics interferers people loose trust. Scientists are one of the most trusted professions.

How loud the unreasonable are is not a measure of the trust of the population in science.