Guest Post: INASP’s Anne Powell — Availability Does Not Equal Access | The Scholarly Kitchen

"A recent post in The Scholarly Kitchen highlighted the crucial link between access and discovery, and the clear conclusion that making information available is not sufficient by itself. Discovery is a complex concept, a web made of tools, technologies, infrastructure and perhaps most importantly, relationships built on an understanding of the needs of users. At INASP we are working on each of these aspects with an ultimate goal of bringing them together on a global level ... To summarize recent events, it seems that health workers, Ministry of Health officials and researchers in Liberia had no knowledge of studies suggesting that Liberia could be considered an endemic zone for Ebola. Bernice Dahn, Chief Medical Officer of Liberia’s Ministry of Health writes in the New York Times that part of the problem is that the studies were conducted without partnership of Liberian health workers or scientists – all data was removed from the country for analysis. Findings were published in European journals inaccessible at the time of publishing, and now expensive to access. In fact, these studies should have been easily available to Liberian researchers and health workers through Research4Life, had they only known that they were there, or indeed, registered to access the program.  This revelation, along with recent reading of Roger Schonfeld’s Ithaka S+R Issue Brief on “Meeting Researchers Where they Start” and his development of that theme in the Scholarly Kitchen got me thinking about the researchers in the 1,900 developing country institutions that INASP serves. Libraries that we work with have access to up to 50,000 online journals and 20,000 e-books through our access and availability programme. They also have over 45,000 titles via Research4Life and other schemes ..."