ESSAYS ON RESEARCH -- TOWARDS OPEN AND EQUITABLE ACCESS TO RESEARCH AND KNOWLEDGE FOR DEVELOPMENT

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• ESSAYS ON RESEARCH -- TOWARDS OPEN AND EQUITABLE ACCESS TO RESEARCH AND KNOWLEDGE FOR DEVELOPMENT

Citation: Chan L, Kirsop B, Arunachalam S (2011) Towards Open and Equitable Access to Research and Knowledge for Development. PLoS Med 8(3): e1001016. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001016

Published: March 29, 2011

Copyright: © 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, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: No funding was received for this article.

Competing interests: Leslie Chan, Barbara Kirsop, and Subbiah Arunachalam are trustees of the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development, which promotes open access. Leslie Chan is the Director of Bioline 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

Provenance: Commissioned; not externally peer reviewed.

Summary Points below; full text is at http://www.ploscollections.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001016

• Unequal access to and distribution of public knowledge is governed by Northern standards and is increasingly inappropriate in the age of the networked “Invisible College”.
• Academic journals remain the primary distribution mechanism for research findings, but commercial journals are largely unaffordable for developing countries; local journals—more relevant to resolving problems in the South—are near-invisible and under-valued.
• Donor solutions are unsustainable, are governed by markets rather than user needs, and instil dependency.
• Open access is sustainable and research driven and builds independence and the capacity to establish a strong research base; it is already converting local journals to international journals.
• However, as open access becomes the norm, standards for the assessment of journal quality and relevance remain based on Northern values that ignore development needs and marginalise local scholarship.