The demand that publicly funded scientific research be freely available to the public and the larger research community (including beyond academia—eg, government departments and non-governmental organisations) has increased in recent years. In line with the goal of open access science, funders of epidemiological cohort studies often mandate that study teams make anonymised datasets available for wider use.

The general positives of open access need not be listed in detail here (eg, it democratises access to data and potentially maximises the use and impact of data). A review done internally by researchers and management at The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing of a selection of publications based on its publicly archived dataset (done to review the nature and assess the quality of a random sample of these outputs) highlighted such benefits; however, it also identified serious, emerging challenges associated with open access. We set out some of these challenges here because they require the attention of the scholarly community.

First, the review found that some publications showed inadequate understanding of the characteristics of the source data or had inadequately treated issues of sampling methods and representativeness of cohorts or subsamples in analyses. These inadequacies have particular implications for epidemiology, for which groups under-represented in panel studies can often be those most affected by a condition.

Brayne, C., O’Mahoney, P., Feeney. J. & Kenny, RA. (2022) The challenges of open access data. Lancet. 2022 Feb 5;399(10324):517. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(21)02721-5. PMID: 35123687.
Publisher (Open Access): https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02721-5/fulltext#articleInformation