Pilot project improves clinician access to research resources - Research Information

"Governments the world over are coming out strongly in favour of open access to publicly-funded research and associated data. It’s a change so profound that it will take years to plan and develop workable business models so that the changes can be implemented fully. National and international government bodies are pushing hard for interim policies to support improved access to important research work sooner rather than later. This year, the EU Commission is implementing policies to improve access to publications and the data arising from research that will be funded under Horizon 2020. Back in 2012 the UK government-sponsored Finch Report recommended that existing licensing arrangements in Britain’s higher education, health and other sectors should be extended to open up publicly-funded research to wider exposure. In response to Finch’s recommendation, Jisc - which offers digital services and solutions for UK education and research through measures like centrally negotiated licensing - has taken a fresh look at its NESLi2 licensing agreements to explore ways to extend their reach. NESLi2 is a national set of agreements that were established a decade ago. They give authorised users in higher education, further education and research communities round the clock access to more than 7,000 online journals published by leading scholarly publishers, whether they are on campus or visiting colleagues and collaborators overseas. One area that has come under scrutiny is health research. Researchers in academia often collaborate with practitioners in clinical settings. However, the resources that they have available are not the same. In the case of long-standing research projects between academic research groups and the British National Health Service (NHS), the academic researchers often have access to broader research than their NHS counterparts in clinical settings. Aware of this disparity, Jisc is co-ordinating a 12-month pilot project to give clinicians working in NHS hospitals free access to respected medical and scientific journals that were not readily available to them before. Clinical content is already extensively and routinely provided by the NHS for use by its staff. This new initiative supplements what is already available to clinicians by adding in a new layer of primary scientific research. It will open up leading-edge research for scrutiny by those who treat patients and enable them to explore and evaluate the latest thinking on the causes disease ... The publishers working on the pilot include many of the biggest names in scientific scholarly journal publishing from across the globe: AAAS, Annual Reviews, Elsevier,IOP Publishing, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press, Royal Society of Chemistry and Springer.  The pilot is being funded by an anonymous donation of around£49,000 ..."