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

Chan, Leslie; Arunachalam, Subbiah; Kirsop, Barbara

Since research scholars do not take the time and effort to download articles unless they need that information for their own research purposes, the proof of the value of open access comes in part from usage statistics. Al though it has always been difficult to measure the real impact of specific research findings on the progress of science, it is now being shown that the number of art icles downloaded from an information resource is a measure of future citation and, by extension, of im pact. 20, 21 Usage of open access journals published by develop ing countries was shown to be significant from the start, 22 and is growing steadily as more material be comes available. Statistics from Bioline International show an increasing volume of usage, including fulltext downloads, from 2002 to 2008 (Table 1 ). In 2008, the total number of fulltext requests surpassed 4.2 million, indicating the very significant need for previously un available research information. Figure 2 , an overlay map from the Bioline website of the distribution of users, indicates that usage was largely -though by no means exclusively -from devel oping regions, which suggests that broken links between neighbouring developing countries often fa cing similar health and environmental problems are be ing repaired. SciELO journals have also seen increasing highvolume usage. Figure 3 shows the number of hits over a 4year period from the SciELO Chile site.