Open Access: Open for readership and Open for publication Kuan-Teh Jeang (Retrovirology)

Impact factor: 4.04

J VIROL RETROVIROLOGY VIROLOGY J GEN VIROL J MED VIROL2.831 VIRUS RES2.810 CURR HIV RES AIDS RES HUM RETROV J NEUROVIROL1.943 ARCH VIROL1.839

New access technologies are gaining traction in developing countries Example: the number of mobile phones in Africa has doubled in the past two years. Now there are more than 200 million cell phones; 10 times the number of landlines.

Access to knowledge is clearly a fundamental requirement for development. How could one achieve United Nations Millennium Development Goals such as the following without ensuring that developing countries have equal access to the latest relevant scientific and medical literature? Reduce child mortality Improve maternal health Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases Ensure environmental sustainability Develop a global partnership for development

WHO access solutions such as HINARI are good, but insufficient, steps. They represent limited access to some content for a period of time. The publisher still retains exclusive rights over that content and determines how it may be used. It is not allowable (without special permission) for research distributed under such schemes to be reprinted nor for derived works (such as educational material) to be created and distributed. Initiatives such as HINARI fail to address access in countries with large economies such as Brazil, India, China, and South Africa. These countries have low per- capita incomes, but they are nevertheless generally excluded from initiatives such as HINARI.

There is a measurable demand for Open Access Indian Journal of Medical Sciences, published by the Indian open-access publisher MedKnow The transition of MedKnow’s journals, since 2001, the rate of citation of previously published articles from Med-Know’s archive is reported to have increased fivefold. Bioline, a joint Brazilian/Canadian project that helps journals from 24 low-income countries make articles freely available online, reports that the annual number of downloads of full text articles from its website increased from just 27,000 in 2000 to 2.5 million in David Lipman: Existing numbers indicate that only one-third of the users of PubMed are academicians and researchers, whereas two-thirds are the "public".

Malaria Journal authors:

No single author has ever been refused publication due to inability to pay Authors include China, India, Pakistan, Brazil, and South Africa

Proactive steps to take Subscription-only journals should eliminate the access barriers for developing countries. Funders should require as a condition of funding that grant recipients make the results of their research universally accessible. Funders should provide funds for open access publishing. Subscription journal are currently supported by institutions’ central library budgets. Institutions should similarly provide central support to cover the cost of open-access publication. Metrics should be developed to quantify the health impact of Open Access to knowledge. Impact should not necessary be measured by the number of citations that are generated (i.e. stimulate further paper publishing) but should gauge positive public health outcomes.

Acknowledgements Matt Cockerill & Bart G. J. Knols: many slides contain information excerpted from their paper “Open Access to Research for the Developing World” at Biomed Central (BMC London) publisher of Retrovirology the National Institutes of Health, USA, supports my HIV research