[A2k] The chain of communication in health science: from researcher to health worker through open access

[Teresa Hackett (eIFL)]

Open Medicine, Vol 3, No 2 (2009)
http://www.openmedicine.ca/article/view/298/245

Dear colleagues,

This commentary by Leslie Chan, Subbiah Arunachalam and Barbara Kirsop
in Open Medicine, a peer-reviewed, independent, open-access
journal addresses the public health benefits of open access, points to
strategies for making publications accessible and reusable, provides
examples of successes so far and concludes with recommendations on how
best to maximize the return on investment for health research. It also
gives examples of damage to health caused by inadequate access to
current research.

Thanks to Iryna Kuchma for the pointer.

Below is a summary, the whole article can be read at
http://www.openmedicine.ca/article/view/298/245.

Teresa
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Globally, the public and private sectors spend billions of dollars each
year on biomedical and health-related research. Yet in many parts of the
world, health care systems are far from achieving the health outcomes
targeted by the UN Millennium Development Goals. The reasons for this
disparity are complex, but one key factor that has been consistently
identified is the failure to translate research into effective policy
and practices. Not surprisingly, then, health agencies and funding
bodies around the world are paying closer attention to what is now
generally described as =93knowledge translation,=94 developing mechanisms
that =93strengthen communication between health researchers and users of
health knowledge, enhance capacity for knowledge uptake, and accelerate
the flow of knowledge into beneficial health applications.=941

At the same time, research funding agencies are recognizing that a key
component of the knowledge translation process is ensuring that the
primary research resulting from their funding is shared as widely as
possible. As Robert Terry, a former senior policy adviser at the
Wellcome Trust, the largest private charitable medical funding agency in
the UK, said, =93Just funding the research is a job only half done. A
fundamental part of [our] mission is to ensure the widest possible
dissemination and unrestricted access to that research.=942 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 publication.3

One of the first groups to require deposit of articles in open access
institutional repositories (IRs) was Research Councils UK, which
includes the Medical Research Council. More recently, the US National
Institutes of Health (NIH), the world=92s largest medical funding body,
made it mandatory for researchers to submit final peer-reviewed journal
manuscripts that result from NIH funding to PubMed Central. This
requirement was made into law by the US Congress, which passed the
Public Access Policy (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008).4 Likewise,
the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) enacted an open access
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 publication of research results (e.g.,
nucleic acid sequences must be deposited into GenBank).5

These are prominent examples of agencies who understand that "[t]imely
and unrestricted access to research findings is a defining feature of
science, and is essential for advancing knowledge and accelerating our
understanding of human health and disease."6 A total of 112 major
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 development.7 (See Box 1 for a list of the websites of open access
groups mentioned in this article.) It is recognized that restricted
access to research publications imposed by cost and by copyright
permission leads to inefficiency and delay in discovery, isolation of
researchers and, above all, a broken link between researchers and the
research users. Funding organizations are increasingly requiring that
those applying for funding provide the website addresses of publications
deposited in IRs, since funders do not always have subscriptions to all
the journals holding articles of potential applicants.8 Since research
users include not only other researchers but also policy- and
decision-makers, front-line health workers, NGOs and members of the
public, open access for everyone is vital to the overall success of the
knowledge exchange process, as it vastly expands the opportunities for
translating health research into improved public health.

The remainder of this article further expands on the public health
benefits of open access, points to strategies for making publications
accessible and reusable, provides examples of successes so far and
concludes with recommendations on how best to maximize the return on
investment for health research.