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

Chan, Leslie; Arunachalam, Subbiah; Kirsop, Barbara

Since 2001, the global scholarly community has begun to take corrective measures and is widely adopting re commendations outlined in the Budapest Open Access Initiative. The Internet has made possible two recom mendations that have the potential to release informa tion locked away in expensive publications. These are (1) to deposit copies of an author's final refereed accep ted article in his or her interoperable IR (also known as author selfarchiving), or (2) to publish in an open ac cess journal. The IR option, or selfarchiving, is increasingly be ing adopted by funding bodies and universities around the world, as Figure 1 shows. Selfarchiving requires the installation of free software that conforms to the inter nationally accepted OAIMPH metadata harvest pro tocol, which allows all IRs to be searched (by Google, Yahoo, and specialist search programs such as OAIster) as though all were a single resource. It is important to note that selfarchiving is accepted by some 63% of journals registered on the SHERPA database of pub lishers' copyright policies. †This lowcost option is em inently appropriate for lowincome countries. 18 The open access journal option requires the develop ment of alternative funding models that allow free ac cess to all "readers" and the recovery of publishing costs by alternative economic mechanisms, such as author fees -whereby authors or their organizations pay the document management costs -or other chargeable services, advertising or institutional support. None of the open access journals published in developing coun tries charges either authors or readers; they recover costs through alternative means. It has been rightly ar gued that, even though a number of journals waive pay ment on request, switching to an authorfee model does not help researchers in lowincome countries but merely shifts the burden of cost from reader to author. Of these, about 16% have been established in institutes and universities in developing countries. The Directory of Open Access Repositories maintains a simil ar list. The relatively low cost of establishing and main taining IRs makes them a highly appropriate means of distributing local research findings and helping close the knowledge gaps. As outlined above, deposit of already published articles in interoperable IRs that com ply with internationally developed and accepted metadata protocols (e.g., OAIMPH protocol) allows free and immediate access for researchers who are un able to afford the feebased versions.