The chain of communication in health science: from researcher to health worker through open access

Chan, Leslie; Arunachalam, Subbiah; Kirsop, Barbara

spend billions of dollars each year on biomedical and healthrelated research. Yet in many parts of the world, health care systems are far from achieving the health outcomes targeted by the UN Millennium De velopment Goals The reasons for this disparity are com plex, but one key factor that has been consistently identified is the failure to translate research into effect ive policy and practices. Not surprisingly, then, health agencies and funding bodies around the world are pay ing closer attention to what is now generally described as "knowledge translation," developing mechanisms that "strengthen communication between health re searchers and users of health knowledge, enhance capa city for knowledge uptake, and accelerate the flow of knowledge into beneficial health applications." 1 At the same time, research funding agencies are re cognizing that a key component of the knowledge trans lation process is ensuring that the primary research resulting from their funding is shared as widely as pos sible. As Robert Terry, a former senior policy adviser at the Wellcome Trust, the largest private charitable medic al funding agency in the UK, said, "Just funding the re search is a job only half done. A fundamental part of [our] mission is to ensure the widest possible dissemina tion and unrestricted access to that research." 2 The Wellcome Trust believes that maximizing access to the research they fund will increase the health applications and benefits of that research. As a result, since 2005 the Trust has made it a condition that all those receiving grants must deposit electronic copies of journal articles resulting from Wellcome funding into the UK PubMed Central open access repository within 6 months of pub lication. 3 One of the first groups to require deposit of articles in open access institutional repositories (IRs) was Re search Councils UK, which includes the Medical Re search Council. More recently, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world's largest medical funding body, made it mandatory for researchers to submit final peerreviewed journal manuscripts that result from NIH funding to PubMed Central. This re quirement was made into law by the US Congress, which passed the Public Access Policy (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008). 4 Likewise, the Canadian In stitutes of Health Research (CIHR) enacted an open ac cess policy requiring authors who received CIHR funding to make their publications openly available within 6 months of publication. In addition, CIHR grant recipients are required to deposit bioinformatics, as well as atomic and molecular coordinate data, into the appropriate public database immediately upon publica Open Medicine 2009 3(3):1 1 1 -1 1 9 tion of research results (e.g., nucleic acid sequences must be deposited into GenBank). 5 These are prominent examples of agencies who under stand that "[t]imely and unrestricted access to research findings is a defining feature of science, and is essential for advancing knowledge and accelerating our under standing of human health and disease." 6 A total of 112 ma jor research organizations and funding bodies have now made similar requirements and are listed in the Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies database, with a further 14 such mandates under develop ment. 7 (See Box 1 for a list of the websites of open access groups mentioned in this article.) It is recognized that re stricted access to research publications imposed by cost and by