The neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are a group of chronic infections that are often considered together because they primarily affect one billion of the world's poorest people and attract little attention from the global medical community....
Universities are uniquely positioned to provide biomedical and clinical expertise, and they boast core missions that seek to promote the public welfare. The university motto of the Rockefeller University, for instance, is: “pro bono humani generis,” or “science for the benefit of humanity”. In this article, we propose that innovative student-led campaigns to address NTDs can and do make a practical difference. We discuss these efforts at our universities.
In coming to medical school, several of us had like-minded interests in global health and were committed to making a practical difference. We formed a small caucus of medical and graduate students at the Weill Cornell Medical College, Rockefeller University, and Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute Tri-Institutional (Tri-I) campus in New York to explore the issue. We partnered with a growing student-led movement across universities, called Universities Allied for Essential Medicines. This movement recently [November 2006] catalyzed the creation of the Philadelphia Consensus Statement to promote equal access to university discoveries in the developing world and to promote university research on global health concerns. We brought the movement to our local campuses to find how our homegrown resources could be best leveraged....
University students are by no means passive players in the efforts to increase biomedical attention to the developing world....
PS: For more background, see my 11/18/06 post on the Philadelphia Consensus Statement.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/25/2007 08:54:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
