In this issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, we are proud to present the symposium “Sharing Data in a Medical Information Commons.” As guest-editors Robert Cook-Deegan, Mary A. Majumder, and Amy L. McGuire write in their introduction, sharing medical information and research in a forum open to everyone, with input not only from the funders but from research participants, community members, researchers, and others can lead to positive outcomes and better research work. Specifically, the editors tell us that
We believe that, collectively, the papers contained in this special issue represent an impressive body of work covering many facets of the enterprise of building an MIC. Like the deliberants in the community advisory panels, we are both hopeful and concerned. We are convinced of the promise of the MIC, its potential for broad use leading to benefits that improve health — improve lives — and are equitably distributed. We worry that this promise will be undercut by a superficial versus deep commitment to participant-centricity and trustworthiness, by failures to address obstacles and restructure incentives to support data sharing, and by laws and regulations that fall short of what is needed. We believe this work can be a catalyst for a wider conversation leading to a future that is more in line with our hopes.
Because of the importance of the symposium's central message of openness, the guest-editors and their home institution, Baylor College of Medicine, have seen to it that all of the articles in this collection are open-access and available for anyone to read and download at journals.sagepub.com/home/lme. ASLME members can find ALL of JLME's published work open and available at aslme.org by using the member portal to the SAGE JLME page. Separately, ASLME remains committed to making some of the material we publish open-access and available to everyone by routinely promoting a selection of our most-read and most interesting articles and making them open-access for a period of time on the SAGE-JLME website. Of course, the best way to make certain you see everything published in our journal is to be a member of ASLME, where you will receive not only a paper copy of every issue of JLME and our sister publication, the American Journal of Law & Medicine, but also complete digital access to all current and back issues. If you are not a member of ASLME, we do invite you to take a look at our brand-new website and all it has to offer. Finally, to all of our current members: thank you for taking this journey with us. We hope you find all of this as interesting and enlightening as we do as when we bring it to our readers.
