Exciting news! OpenTrials, a project in which Open Knowledge is developing an open, online database of information about the world’s clinical research trials, will officially launch its beta on Monday 10th October 2016 at the World Health Summit in Berlin. After months of work behind-the-scenes meeting, planning, and developing, we’re all really excited about demoing OpenTrials to the world and announcing how to access and use the site!
The launch will take place at the ‘Fostering Open Science in Global Health’ workshop, with OpenTrials being represented by our Community Manager, Ben Meghreblian. The workshop will be a great opportunity to talk about the role of open data, open science, and generally how being open can bring improvements in medicine and beyond!
As the workshop’s theme is public health emergencies, we’ll also be demoing Ebola Trials Tracker, another OpenTrials project showing how long it takes for the results of Ebola trials to be made available.
If you’ll be attending the conference or the workshop, we’d love to meet you – please do get in touch and let us know.
Hack Day
If that wasn’t enough, we also have a confirmed date and location for the OpenTrials Hack Day – it will take place on Saturday 8th October at the German office of Wikimedia in Berlin.
We’re inviting people from a range of backgrounds. So, if you’re developer, data scientist, health technologist, open data advocate, or otherwise interested in health, medicine, and clinical trials, come along and learn more about the data that powers OpenTrials, how it’s structured, and how to use our API to search the OpenTrials database or build applications using the data.
On the day our technical lead and a domain expert will be on hand to explain the data and facilitate the day – we’re really looking forward to seeing what clever hacks and mini-projects you’ll create.
For those of you who have already asked, we’ll be releasing documentation on the OpenTrials API and database soon, but meanwhile if you’re interested in the event you’ll find more details on the OpenTrials Eventbrite page, or you can register quickly below.
OpenTrials is funded by The Laura and John Arnold Foundation and directed by Dr. Ben Goldacre, an internationally known leader on clinical transparency.
Contact: opentrials@okfn.org
Twitter: @opentrials
Ben is the Community Manager for OpenTrials, an Open Knowledge project aiming to produce an open, easy-to-use, linked database of information about the world's clinical trials. He has a background in psychology and IT, and previously worked on the AllTrials campaign, which calls for greater transparency in clinical trials.
