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Towards Open and Equitable Access to Research and Knowledge for Development

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Towards Open and Equitable Access to Research and Knowledge for Development Essay Towards Open and Equitable Access to Research and Knowledge for Development Leslie Chan*, Barbara Kirsop, Subbiah Arunachalam There is growing recognition that the deshi institutions, and the subsequent wean research communities off dependen- capacity to conduct research and to share announcement that Bangladesh is in cy systems and onto true open access (OA) the resulting knowledge is fundamental to transition towards a paid licensing resources. These resources include the all aspects of human development, from scheme [1], is sobering. It reminds us growing number of OA journals and improving health care delivery to increas- that large multinational publishers are institutional repositories worldwide that ing food security, and from enhancing driven primarily by commercial motives are now accessible free of cost to anyone education to stronger evidence-based pol- and market shares, and that HINARI with Internet access. The growing volume icymaking. Today, the primary vehicle for may be serving as a marketing device to of OA resources provides a far greater disseminating research is still the peer- prepare the ground for national site degree of freedom for researchers to reviewed journal, which has retained licenses in the countries with rising exchange and collaborate, for knowledge much of its traditional form and function, GDP or growing research needs. Site to be translated into useable forms by although now it is largely digital. But licensing is a standard subscription prac- frontline health workers, and for emerging despite improved access to the Internet, tice of commercial publishers for provid- technologies such as text mining and researchers in the developing world con- ing institution-wide electronic access to semantic tagging for faster knowledge tinue to face two problems—gaining their journals. Fees for site licensing discovery to be used. It must be under- access to academic publications due to generally vary according to the number scored that such usages and redistribution the high cost of subscriptions, and getting of institutional users. It is also common are not permitted by donated content their research published in ‘‘international’’ for large multinational publishers to included in the Research4Life programs, journals, because their work is either combine all of their journal holdings into even though users are free to read such considered to be only of local or regional one large ‘‘take-it-or-leave-it’’ bundle, content. Further, while the ’’free access’’ interest or does not meet the quality often referred to as the ‘‘Big Deal’’ [2]. programs purport to be providing essential standards required by the major commer- While the Big Deal is a legitimate articles to researchers in poor nations cial indexes. The cartographic representa- commercial strategy, even rich institu- (excluding countries such as India where tion of the world according to the volume tions in the North can ill-afford the the publishers have an existing market), of publications from each country in early continuing rising cost. It is very clear access is not country-wide, but is only 2000 starkly depicts a world of highly that for low-income countries, the so- available if the researchers work in the unequal contribution and participation in called information philanthropy [3] is registered institutions. science (Figure 1). not a long-term sustainable solution to This inequity has led to the misguided ensure access to publicly funded research South–South Collaborations notion that little, if any, research of publications, a prerequisite for develop- substance is generated in the global South, ingastrongandindependentresearch For scholarly publishers and researchers and that the needs of researchers in poor base. in the South, OA is particularly important countries are therefore met solely by because it provides an unprecedented information donation from the North. Misguided Dependencies on opportunity for South–South exchange The one-way North to South flow of Free Subscriptions and for local research to become an knowledge is not all that is necessary for integral part of the global knowledge development, and the Research4Life pro- Coming as these programs do with the commons. More importantly, research gram only addresses part of the problem blessings of the UN agencies and powerful findings from regions with similar socio- (http://www.research4life.org/). The Re- commercial publishers, it has been hard to economic conditions may be far more search4Life program is the collective name for three journal access programs–HI- Citation: Chan L, Kirsop B, Arunachalam S (2011) Towards Open and Equitable Access to Research and NARI, AGORA, and OARE—and com- Knowledge for Development. PLoS Med 8(3): e1001016. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001016 prises a public–private partnership be- tween major commercial publishers Published March 29, 2011 and three United Nations (UN) agencies Copyright: ß 2011 Chan et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, (Box 1). provided the original author and source are credited. The recent announcement by the Funding: No funding was received for this article. commercial publisher Elsevier (a HI- Competing Interests: Leslie Chan, Barbara Kirsop, and Subbiah Arunachalam are trustees of the Electronic NARI founding partner) of withdrawal Publishing Trust for Development, which promotes open access. Leslie Chan is the Director of Bioline of access to their journals from Bangla- International, which hosts the African Health Sciences journal. Abbreviations: HINARI, Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative; JIF, journal impact factor; OA, open access; UN, United Nations; WHO, World Health Organization The Essay section contains opinion pieces on topics of broad interest to a general medical audience. * E-mail: [email protected] Provenance: Commissioned; not externally peer reviewed. PLoS Medicine | www.plosmedicine.org 1 March 2011 | Volume 8 | Issue 3 | e1001016 Summary Points the latter of which all three authors are trustees. N Unequal access to and distribution of public knowledge is governed by Northern standards and is increasingly inappropriate in the age of the Structural Inequity in Current networked ‘‘Invisible College’’. Reward Systems N Academic journals remain the primary distribution mechanism for research findings, but commercial journals are largely unaffordable for developing Another major potential of OA is the countries; local journals—more relevant to resolving problems in the South— correction to the current structural prob- are near-invisible and under-valued. lem of the academic evaluation and N Donor solutions are unsustainable, are governed by markets rather than user reward system, which has been dominated needs, and instil dependency. by a set of narrowly defined citation measures, most notably the journal impact N Open access is sustainable and research driven and builds independence and the capacity to establish a strong research base; it is already converting local factor (JIF), owned and controlled by the journals to international journals. information conglomerate Thomson Reu- ters. The consolidation of the JIF as a N However, as open access becomes the norm, standards for the assessment of global yardstick for measuring the quality journal quality and relevance remain based on Northern values that ignore development needs and marginalise local scholarship. of journals has created a highly competi- tive landscape of journal ranking and citation gaming, with journals from the relevant than research from the richer content is also archived in PubMedCentral developing countries being consistently countries. This is particularly true with (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/jour marginalized [4,5]. health care and medical treatments. nals/378/), ensuring the long-term ac- This structural inequality has resulted in Take, for example, the journal African cessibility of the growing body of knowl- a citation and reputation divide in the Health Sciences, edited by Dr. James K. edge recorded in the journal and by the developing world, with a sub-community Tumwine and published by the Faculty growing community of researchers from of authors who publish almost exclusively of Medicine at Makerere University in the region. It is encouraging to know that in ‘‘international’’ journals indexed in the Uganda. This 10-year-old journal is thriv- across Africa, the number of journals Thomson Reuters (formerly ISI) Web of ing on the Web (http://www.bioline.org. that are becoming OA is growing, as is Knowledge, while others are oriented br/hs) and gaining international recogni- awareness about institutional repositories, towards research and publication in ‘‘lo- tion and global usage, showing that OA thanks to the efforts of organizations cal’’ journals on topics of interest to is not only viable, but with time will such as the Electronic Information for ‘‘local’’ audiences [6]. And even though become the norm. The journal is one of a Libraries (http://www.eifl.org/) and the the latter may have greater impact for local small number of African-based journals Electronic Publishing Trust for Develop- or regional economic growth and public indexed by Medline, and the journal ment (http://www.epublishingtrust.org/), policy, these publications are often neglect- Figure 1. Unequal contribution and participation in science. Image ß Copyright SASI Group (University
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