Making science global

LONDON — Imagine if someone agreed to fund your new research project but barred you from searching any previously published work on the subject. No epidemiological data, no idea of the success or failure of earlier studies on the same thing and no contextual information to help you focus your research efforts. And at the end of it all, little or no chance of getting your work published in any of the prestigious peer-reviewed journals.For some scientists in the developing world, that's pretty much how things are. The prohibitive costs of subscribing to thousands of academic journals mean they have very limited access to research data and what they can acquire is often restricted to abstracts. But all that could start to change from Friday 24 May, when a World Health Organization initiative to provide affordable published material to poorer nations moves into the next stage of development. Called HINARI — or Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative — it aims initially to give over 100 developing nations access to the full text and fully searchable databases of more than 2,000 biomedical journals.HINARI is an agreement between WHO and some of the world's leading scientific publishers to produce a sliding scale of fees for libraries in poorer nations who want to have access to their journals online. Under the fee scale, the very poorest nations — those with a per capita annual Gross National Product of less than US$1,000 — will pay nothing. The number involved in this group will be relatively small and will include countries such as Afghanistan and Sierra Leone.Those nations with an annual GNP per capita of $1,000–3,000 will be able to gain access to the same journals at heavily discounted rates, although these have yet to be detailed. Maurice Long, from the BMJ Publishing Group, says the scale of the discounts will be left to each publisher to decide. "Some will charge more, some will charge less. It's down to each one to decide what discount but it will be massive. It's a principle of this partnership that each company is free to do whatever it wants."Long says it's unlikely the BMJ Publishing Group will charge anything to those countries with under $3,000 per capita GNP but adds this is probably not representative. "Most companies will want to charge something but there's a very strong feeling that because this is about biomedical research, there's an element of social responsibility."The WHO says it hopes the strategy will have a number of benefits. These include strengthening research in developing nations by allowing researchers to share vital information, allowing them to compete for grants with colleagues in wealthier countries, stopping the 'brain drain' of bright young scientists to the developed world and bringing poorer nations into the international community of researchers.Barbara Aronson, project manager for HINARI at WHO, says it's part of a wider campaign to direct more resources at combating the health problems of the developing world. "Many of the health problems of the developing world are not being worked on at all by researchers in other parts of the world, mainly because those same diseases do not exist there. Therefore, the available resources go on researching things that are problems in the developed world. "Researchers in poorer nations work with very, very few resources. Often, they are extremely dedicated but are working with no basic information — so how can they find out what's already known about their subjects? The information is available but at a price. The effect is they get very frustrated and end up being offered jobs elsewhere."But beyond basic research, the absence of robust scientific information is also having a detrimental effect on doctors' training, she believes. "This is not only about researchers in poorer nations but about training the people who become doctors in these countries. Schools have low salaries, terrible facilities and libraries that are empty. That means doctors are not trained as well as they could be and the really good ones end up going abroad."The first phase of the project was launched earlier this year, when more than 1,400 journals published by the five largest commercial journal houses became free online to those countries who qualified for free access.But the initiative takes a big step forward on Friday when the catalogue of journals will be extended to over 2,000 as more publishers come on board. By the end of this year, it is predicted, the bulk of the world's 'important' biomedical research and healthcare journals will be available.The list of publishers is varied. It includes the BMJ Publishing Group, Blackwell Publishing, Elsevier Science, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press and Taylor and Francis as well as several other commercial enterprises. BioMed Central is also taking part.A number of medical institutions with the copyright to journals also appear, including the American Medical Association, the American College of Physicians, the Canadian Medical Association and the UK's Royal Society of Medicine.But one of the features of the project is that each participating publisher gets to choose what journals they make available and which institutions or countries are eligible to get them online. The question is whether publishers will use this an opportunity to generate good public relations while at the same time only putting forward a small selection of material for developing nations. According to Barbara Aronson, who was involved in the first approaches to the big publishing firms on cheap access to poorer nations, this seems unlikely. "No doubt they are pleased with the publicity they are getting. But I have been struck by the incredible goodwill of some publishers. I was floored at a meeting we had with them when we asked what could we do about countries with per capita GNP of under $1,000. Straight away, they agreed they should have the information free."Aronson says she understands that online users will get everything a journal subscriber gets — including same day access and fully searchable archives. And while there's a chance some publishers may offer a token number of journals, most have been very forthcoming, she says.Jan Velterop, publisher at BioMed Central — which generates revenue from charging a fee to authors rather than readers, but does not charge authors from developing countries — says publishers probably realise it's a win–win situation for them and an ideal opportunity to raise their profiles in countries where currently they do little or no business. "It's very good for them because they are making journals available to countries where they normally would not sell one penny's worth of material. It does not cost them anything and yet they have positive public relations out of it. Having said that, I still think it's a good idea and very helpful for poor countries. But don't forget, it's only the poorest of the poor countries that get it free."

Making science global

From Friday, researchers in over 100 developing nations will have low-cost Internet access to more than 2,000 biomedical journals under a major WHO initiative.

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