Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Monday, November 17, 2008

OA for health researchers in developing countries

Joanna Adcock and Edward Fottrell, The North-South information highway: case studies of publication access among health researchers in resource-poor countries, Global Health Action, November 13, 2008. (Thanks to Peter Byass.) Abstract:

... More than half of the respondents (n=12, 52%) expressed dissatisfaction with their access to print and online journals, directly relating this to inadequate university and research budgets. ...

[Barriers to publishing in a peer-reviewed journal included] insufficient access to existing information on the research subject.

Thirteen respondents (56%) were opposed to the author-pays model of publishing. Seventeen respondents (78%) stated that they would be unwilling or unable to pay a fee to publish their work, although 4 of these individuals stated that they would be willing to publish in an author-pays journal if their employer or funder paid the fees. ...

The impact of new open-access initiatives on [the lack of access to up-to-date literature] will be an important outcome measure of their overall effectiveness. ...

Current open-access and aid-based initiatives are invaluable and have undoubtedly improved access to information. However, based on views expressed by study respondents, the author-pays model of open access appears to fall short of successfully overcoming unidirectional information flow. ... Further investigation into the knowledge and attitudes of academics from resource-poor settings in relation to open-access and author-pays models is important ... Whatever the cause, however, there is a danger that this unwillingness or inability to pay to publish may perpetuate the imbalance of a North to South information flow, in that academics in resource-poor countries are still not contributing to academic literature ...

[A] powerful message from the preliminary findings presented here is a need for more direct editorial support, coupled with efforts to improve access to academic literature, in order to open up bidirectional information flow. More innovative thinking around the entire publication process is therefore needed. Along the lines of AuthorAID and INASP, models offering author mentoring schemes (scientific as well as editorial) combined with low publication fees and open access platforms whilst maintaining scientific rigour are likely to play a significant role in addressing the gross inequality between North and South. ...