The Open Source Medicine Foundation publishes research information: compiled evidence on candidate therapeutics, biomarkers, clinical trials and post-viral conditions. It is read by patients, clinicians, researchers and journalists, so the way we select and present evidence has to be visible. This page sets out those rules. Where a page departs from them, that is an error and we want to hear about it.
1. What we publish, and what we don't
We publish three kinds of material: peer-reviewed research by our directors and collaborators, listed in the Research Library; plain-language research notes that summarise a paper or a tracker dataset; and compiled data on the Research Tracker, built from public databases. We do not publish treatment recommendations, dosing guidance or product endorsements. Where a page lists a compound in a trial, it is reporting that a trial exists, not that the compound works.
2. Sources we accept
- Studies: PubMed-indexed, peer-reviewed publications. Preprints and grey literature are included only in cohort data and are flagged as such.
- Trials: ClinicalTrials.gov registry entries, retrieved daily, shown with their registry status and ID.
- Targets and compounds: DGIdb, Open Targets and ChEMBL for gene–drug interactions; UniProt and Ensembl for identifiers.
- Biomarkers: a marker enters an atlas only when a peer-reviewed abstract states its direction in the disease versus a named comparison population, with a verbatim quote and a DOI recorded for every entry.
- Safety data: official pharmacovigilance sources (VAERS, EudraVigilance, national systems) on the Vaccine Data Navigator, with their known reporting limitations stated.
3. How evidence is graded
Tracker pages grade each agent–target relationship in three tiers: clinical (evidence from studies in people), mechanistic (a documented molecular action on the target) and correlative (an association reported in the literature without a demonstrated mechanism). Trial size and phase are shown as recorded in the registry. Nothing on the site presents an unregistered or unpublished claim as evidence.
4. Automation and human review
Much of the tracker is assembled by software: daily PubMed and registry fetches, database queries, and language-model extraction of marker directions from abstracts. The extraction step is constrained to the text supplied, must return a verbatim quote, and anything without a citation is discarded. Compiled pages say so in their byline ("compiled from the OSMF Research Tracker"). Research notes about our own papers are written by the named author and reviewed by a second scientist named on the page. Automated pages are spot-checked; if you find an error, see section 7.
5. Authors and reviewers
Every research note carries a named author with an ORCID and an author page. Our authors are the people who did the work. We do not use ghostwriters and do not publish sponsored content.
6. Funding and conflicts of interest
The foundation is a non-profit (Open Source Medicine Foundation MTÜ, Tallinn, Estonia) funded by individual donations and research grants. It accepts no funding from pharmaceutical, nutraceutical or device companies, and does not sell products. Where a cohort or study in our data was produced by our own team, the record says so. Directors' external affiliations are listed on their author pages.
7. Corrections
If something on the site is wrong, out of date, or misleading, write to the contact address or open an issue on the tracker's GitHub repository (see Contribute). We aim to respond within seven days. Material corrections are made on the page with a note of what changed; tracker data corrections flow through the next daily rebuild. We do not silently edit published claims.
8. Updates and dating
Tracker pages regenerate daily and show their data date. Apex pages show a published and an updated date where one applies. Compiled research notes are snapshots: they state the date their numbers were taken and link to the live page.
9. Licensing and reuse
Compiled datasets and pages are published under CC BY 4.0; study records remain the property of their publishers and are cited, not reproduced. Every page carries a "Cite this page" box, and the tracker as a whole can be cited by its DOI (see the repository's CITATION.cff).
10. Not medical advice
Nothing on this site is a substitute for advice from a qualified clinician who knows you. The site exists so that patients and clinicians can look at the evidence together; it does not tell anyone what to take.