Public Access: Getting More Research to More People | The Scholarly Kitchen

"While open access (OA) is by far the most well-known form of public access, it is not the only one. Having spent two days last week at Research4Life meetings in Washington, DC and with today’s announcement that more than 80% of UK local authorities have now signed up for the Access to Research initiative, now seems like a good time to take a look at what else is on offer. R4L – and especially the HINARI program – is, of course, the Big Kahuna of public access programs. Access is free to WHO Band A countries and costs $1,500 per institution for those in Band B, for a collection of journals whose estimated value is around $10 million. Launched in 2003, its stats today are impressive, with 549 publishers providing access to over 15,300 journals and nearly 30,000 books and other publications in more than 7,300 institutions across 116 countries. However, it should also be pointed out that, while seemingly equally impressive, the downloads generated by HINARI access – 8.3 million last year* – are in fact roughly equal to the total number of downloads by Yale University during the same time period. This is not to underplay the value of R4L, but it is an indication of how far we have yet to go to bridge the access gap between the developed and developing worlds. Even with completely free access to so much content, researchers in the world’s poorest countries are only using the literature a fraction of the amount that their counterparts from wealthier countries do. There are all sorts of reasons for this, including huge variations in R&D funding, fewer researchers per capita, and lack of reliable access to the internet and/or hardware (see for example here) ..."