Open Science and Autism's False Prophets

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Paul Offit has a new book out called Autism's False Prophets, which looks at how the myth about vaccination causing autism arose and spread. As his condensed essay on the subject says, it's a far from simple story, but one that has echoes in areas such as climate change where science and public policy must dine at the same table. I still haven't decided whether open science will make a difference to this or not: putting data, calculations, and papers freely available online in real time will help scientists talk to one another, but I don't think it will help them communicate with the other 99.9% of our species. Thoughts?