Laura Janneck is resident at Mass General and the Brigham and one he founders the Right to Research Coalition. The group argues that the high cost of peer-reviewed journals is limiting access to important research findings. Member include student groups from MIT, Tufts and Dartmouth.
She writes on the group’s website about a new development — publishers who offer free access in some countries in the developing world charging for journals in Bangladesh. Why? Because the journals say docs there can now afford to buy subscriptions.
One of the areas in which open access can make a substantial impact is in the field of international medicine and public health. It is the nature of medical science that what is applicable in one corner of the globe is applicable anywhere. A drug that reduces blood pressure will work on human beings from France as well as Zambia. Despite this potential for the global application of medical science, many challenges arise in the implementation, from funding the purchase of medications, to creating supply chains, and training health care workers. One of the most basic challenges is simply disseminating knowledge of these medical advances to the practitioners that may use it….One attempt to address this need has been HINARI: the Health Inter-Network for Access to Research Initiative. This program, started by WHO in 2002, was a means by which health care practitioners and academics in poor countries could access many leading biomedical and public health journals…
But on Jan 11, 2011, an article in the British Medical Journal announced that five major publishers would withdraw free access to more than 2500 of their health and biomedical online journals from HINARI in Bangladesh. The explanation given was that publishers were establishing “active sales” in the country…
Researchers and health care providers affected by these changes responded quickly criticizing the change, as did editors of some of the journals that were pulled. In response to this outrage, most of the publishers have begun to reverse their decision and reinstate access to their journals in Bangladesh. Despite this small success thanks to the vigilance of the global health community, the underlying issue is far from resolved. Many international scholars have taken this as a wake-up call to push forward the open access movement.