Who Needs Open Access?

"Access to information is a human right and is a key element of democracy. Expensive journal paywalls and restrictive copyright laws are barriers to information access that hinder education and the advancement of scientific research, especially in developing countries. Open access publishing facilitates access to scientific and medical research that, in many cases, is needed to address global health problems such as child mortality, malaria, HIV/AIDS, and other diseases. For example, barriers to accessing research articles played a role in impeding the efforts to stop the recent Ebola outbreak. Research findings published several decades ago indicated that Liberia should be included in the Ebola virus endemic zone. However, Liberian healthcare providers and policy-makers couldn’t afford to pay the fees to access the information that could have helped prevent the epidemic and save thousands of lives. In the midst of the outbreak, researchers at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, urged the scientific community to develop standards and practices for sharing data and making outbreak research open access ..."