Ben Goldacre's inaugural lecture: a whistlestop tour of everything we do, from OpenPrescribing via TrialsTracker to OpenSAFELY and Open Science!

Below is the video of Ben Goldacre’s inaugural lecture: a whistlestop tour of the whole history of our group, from OpenPrescribing via TrialsTracker to OpenSAFELY and on through Open Science, policy work, and more. Because it’s an inaugural lecture you also get - at the beginning and the end - mawkish personal moments about history, family and friends.

You can see and use everything described in this lecture, interactively and online.

At OpenPrescribing.net you can use our free and open tools to look at your own GP practice’s prescribing data, just like you’ll see in the video. You’ll be joining 20,000 other users who access the service every month. On the Bennett website, you can see vast amounts of of content about OpenPrescribing: all the papers looking at what drives change in clinical practice across the medical profession; and detailed technical explainers on how we use deep data science to monitor clinical practice across the country and improve safety, quality and effectiveness of prescribing.

At EU.TrialsTracker.net and FDAAA.TrialsTracker.net you can see our live, real-time clinical trial reporting dashboards (and the papers on them in Lancet and BMJ). These cover all trials on medicines across Europe and the US, and show who has - and hasn’t - complied with the rules on reporting their clinical trial’s results. At AllTrials.net you can read about the AllTrials campaign - supported by 747 organisations - for all clinical trials to be registered reported, including its history. You can also read about how the Parliamentary Science and Technology Select Committee sent our data to every university in the country to help them monitor and improve their compliance.

On our policy work, you can read the Goldacre Review in full online at the gov.uk website, including the full 200 page text, the 30 page summary, and the 5 page executive summary.

Lastly, you can read about OpenSAFELY.org: our landmark secure Trusted Research Environment that allows users to run analyses across the NHS GP records of the whole population while also retaining deep trust from privacy campaigners and professional groups. You can read more about how it works here, and the full technical user manual with everything you could ever want to know about the service here. You can see all the papers here, and the 155 projects from users at 22 different organisations including universities, NICE, UKHSA and more. If you’re a data scientist you can start using our tools online, in just a couple of hours, using randomly generated dummy data. All the code for the entire platform is shared freely under open licenses for security review, scientific review, and efficient re-use here, on GitHub. All the code (and we mean all) for every analysis can be found here. You can read more about how we use OpenSAFELY to make it easy and obligatory for users to follow best practice on open science here.

You can read about how NHS England and DHSC have made a major new investment in the NHS England OpenSAFELY Service to secure its future for users across the country, here.

And lastly, if you look closely in the opening minute, you’ll see a galaxy of stars in the audience. Tim Harford sitting next Simon Singh… Dorothy Bishop and Muir Gray… And most importantly our team, our friends, our funders, and our many collaborators.