Edwin Mapara, Medical Open Access: The great value of information at the front lines, Community Centric Sustainable Development Issues, January 18, 2005. Excerpt: 'I have just had an open access article published in the December 2004 PLoS Medicine Journal, Picturing AIDS: Using images to Raise Community Awareness, co-authored with Prof David Morley....Since then close to 200 colleagues have received a copy in Botswana across all sectors, and are academically surprised that what was a "condemned" village initiative in Health Promotion in Lobatse, Botswana, is being used in London. The icing on the cake was to stand with the Director General on the same platform at the World Health Organisation headquarters, Geneva on World AIDS Day 2004 and in a seminar for the WHO staff the following day in Geneva, talking and discussing the same PLoS Medicine, open access, article....If this article was in a restricted publication, it might have only been in the hands of 20 or so consultants at the referral hospitals in their "restricted" offices and another 20 or so bureaucrats at the Ministry ofHealth on the shelves as a "decoration"!...Sub-Saharan Africa has roughly three "Twin Tower" disasters every day or one Tsunami disaster, 150 000 deaths, per month in health related deaths. Sadly, the majority of deaths are preventable but the information is mostly "restricted"!...The HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa is "iatrogenic!" The Health Promotion curriculums have to be re-visited! If that will be done through the Open Access Approach, let it be so. Do we need Nelson Mandela to talk "open access" about his family to take a point home, when there are Open Access Publications!'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/18/2005 10:58:00 PM.
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.
