Open Access: Open for readership and Open for publication

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Open Access Open for readership and Open for
publication

• Kuan-Teh Jeang (Retrovirology)

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Impact factor 4.04
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New access technologies are gaining traction in
developing countries
Example the number of mobile phones in Africa
has doubled in the past two years. Now there
are more than 200 million cell phones 10 times
the number of landlines.
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Access to knowledge is clearly a fundamental
requirement for development. How could one
achieve United Nations Millennium Development
Goals such as the following without ensuring that
developing countries have equal access to the
latest relevant scientific and medical literature?

• Reduce child mortality
• Improve maternal health
• Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases
• Ensure environmental sustainability
• Develop a global partnership for development

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WHO access solutions such as HINARI are good, but
insufficient, steps.

• They represent limited access to some content for
  a period of time. The publisher still retains
  exclusive rights over that content and determines
  how it may be used. It is not allowable (without
  special permission) for research distributed
  under such schemes to be reprinted nor for
  derived works (such as educational material) to
  be created and distributed.
• Initiatives such as HINARI fail to address access
  in countries with large economies such as Brazil,
  India, China, and South Africa. These countries
  have low per-capita incomes, but they are
  nevertheless generally excluded from initiatives
  such as HINARI.

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There is a measurable demand for Open Access

• Indian Journal of Medical Sciences, published by
  the Indian open-access publisher MedKnow The
  transition of MedKnows journals, since 2001, the
  rate of citation of previously published articles
  from Med-Knows archive is reported to have
  increased fivefold.
• Bioline, a joint Brazilian/Canadian project that
  helps journals from 24 low-income countries make
  articles freely available online, reports that
  the annual number of downloads of full text
  articles from its website increased from just
  27,000 in 2000 to 2.5 million in 2006.
• David Lipman Existing numbers indicate that only
  one-third of the users of PubMed are academicians
  and researchers, whereas two-thirds are the
  "public".

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Malaria Journal authors
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• No single author has ever been refused
  publication due to inability to pay
• Authors include China, India, Pakistan, Brazil,
  and South Africa

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Proactive steps to take

• Subscription-only journals should eliminate the
  access barriers for developing countries.
• Funders should require as a condition of funding
  that grant recipients make the results of their
  research universally accessible. Funders should
  provide funds for open access publishing.
• Subscription journal are currently supported by
  institutions central library budgets.
  Institutions should similarly provide central
  support to cover the cost of open-access
  publication.
• Metrics should be developed to quantify the
  health impact of Open Access to knowledge.
  Impact should not necessary be measured by the
  number of citations that are generated (i.e.
  stimulate further paper publishing) but should
  gauge positive public health outcomes.

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Acknowledgements

• Matt Cockerill Bart G. J. Knols
• many slides contain information excerpted from
  their paper Open Access to Research for the
  Developing World at http//www.issues.org/24.2/co
  ckerill.html
• Biomed Central (BMC London) publisher of
• Retrovirology
• the National Institutes of Health, USA, supports
  my HIV research