Event
The Open Inference Project — SoCO Research Meeting, July 24, 2026
Overview
The Open Inference Project studies how medicine learns: how evidence is generated, interpreted, challenged, and ultimately translated into better decisions for patients. This research meeting introduced the project’s central idea — that the analytic context of evidence is often difficult to see, even though it powerfully shapes what published results mean.
Using dermatology as an initial model system, the project asks how often key features of analytic context are visible, how much inferential flexibility surrounds published findings, and how researchers might make that context easier to discover, interpret, and discuss.
We believe our best ideas deserve our colleagues’ best criticism. The goal is not only to produce evidence, but to make the process that produced that evidence more visible, more interpretable, and more open to constructive scrutiny.
Project focus
- Map the analytic search space in biomedical research, beginning in dermatology.
- Study how analytic context influences the interpretation of published evidence.
- Develop practical ways to describe inferential flexibility more clearly and reproducibly.
- Create tools and frameworks that help authors, readers, and reviewers better understand how evidence was produced.
Why it matters
Published results are often treated as isolated facts, even though every result emerges from a set of analytic choices. When that context is difficult to see, evidence is easier to overinterpret. The Open Inference Project aims to make that context more visible so that evidence can be evaluated more rigorously — and used more wisely.