Re: Perceptions of open access publishing: interviews with journal authors | BMJ

"Research journals are expensive to produce and distribute even before the profit margin is added at the academic publishers’ discretion. The consumer-reader is obliged to pay for the journal product, or the author-researcher foots the bill for the prestige of being published in open access journals. The antagonism between the commercial priorities of academic publishers and affordability of journal content will continue until a publishing model that is more acceptable to all parties is devised and widely accepted. Some researchers in the developed world can afford to prioritise journal prestige over publishing fees charged by open journals. This is unlikely to be feasible for both authors and readers elsewhere. It is time that we consider subsidising author and reader access from less developed health systems with poorer staff remuneration. Academic publishing could well learn from the launch of the Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) in Jan 2002. An initiative the World Heath Organization (WHO), HINARI was proposed by Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, Director General of the WHO and United Nations' Secretary General Kofi Annan at the UN Millennium Summit just 12 months earlier. At the beginning, Blackwell, Elsevier Science, Harcourt Worldwide STM Group, Springer Verlag (Bertelsmann), John Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer International Health & Science provided free or low cost full online access to some 1500 journals for the genuinely needy. There are currently 160 participating publishers offering more than 7500 information resources in 30 languages to health institutions in 105 eligible countries. Subsidised and waived journal prices benefits clinical care and biomedical research in low-income settings. Such pricing models recognise biomedical research as being critical to improving the health of the developing world, and that access to primary biomedical information is essential to clinical practice and advancing medical research in low-income countries. That a plea by the UN and the WHO for more affordable online access to major journals in biomedical and related social sciences in developing countries was not only heard but acted upon is cause for optimism. HINARI demonstrates that corporate altruism can occasionally surmount the profit imperative, and could be the precedent for free or low cost access to non-biomedical journals for eligible needy individuals and institutions."