BioMed Central Blog
Berlin 5 and Developing Countries - what's new for developing countries?
In the latest of BioMed Central's occasional series of guest blog items, Barbara Kirsop of the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development reports from the 5th Berlin open access conference:
The Berlin 5 conference was the 5th follow-up meeting since the launch of the Berlin Declaration, and a special session on the impact of Open Access (OA) on developing country science was organised by EPT Trustee Subbiah Arunachalam. I attended as a speaker, together with Dr D K Sahu from MedKnow Publications, India, and Stefka Kalayonova from FAO. The programme is available from http://www.aepic.it/conf/papers.php?cf=10 and abstracts can be found by selecting ‘papers’. Powerpoint presentations and a video webcast are to be made available later.
It should first be reported that there were excellent presentations from the EU Commission, the European Science Foundation, universities, institutes and OA organisations – all describing their activities in further promoting OA developments, both technical and policy related. It is now clear that OA is here to stay and will form, together with associated OA data, the bedrock of scholarly research information exchange in the future. Although some of the old issues continue to be raised by newcomers to OA (and by a diminishing band of OA-deniers), the debate seems to be moving on from establishing institutional repositories and OA journals to infrastructure support for repositories, usage statistics of OA journals, research into improved search and analysis tools and the importance of OA data to aid the discovery of new scientific information This is excellent news for developing countries who at last see a light at the end of the tunnel for levelling the playing field.
Turning to the developing country (DC) session, it is very disappointing to report that this attracted an audience of little over 20! This may have been because of a parallel session on ‘Open Issues in Open Access’, which attracted nearly all the ~300 participants (standing room only), or it may be that the richer countries feel they ‘know it all’ and have little need to heed DC research. But the panel had important facts to report on the impact of OA on DC science, and academics in the developed regions should recognise the need for DC research in solving such global problems as infectious diseases, environmental disasters, HIV/AIDS etc.
Before OA: I had been asked to present an overview of OA developments in the developing countries. I used the results of a 2003 WHO survey of medical institutes to show the dire pre-OA position of access to essential literature in the poorest countries. In countries with a GDP/capita/year< $1000, 56% of medical institutes surveyed had been unable to purchase any subscriptions to journals over the previous 5 years, and the situation was little better in the next economic band of countries. I went on to show what improvements have taken place since the advent of OA.
OA Journals and Institutional Repositories: I showed that the initiatives of Bioline International (http://www.bioline.org.br, Brazil/Canada), SciELO (http://www.scielo.br Brazil and other Latin American countries), MedKnow (http://www.medknow.com, India) and other non-profit services had resulted in the establishment (or conversion to OA) of 537 journals out of a total of 2802 recorded in the Directory of open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org). This shows that ~20% of all O A journals are published in DCs. None of these journals make author charges, all provide full text access. It is clear from these figures that the research community in low-economy countries values incorporation into the international knowledge pool above the income that could be gained from closed access. A similar situation can be shown with OA institutional repositories. Of the ~915 IRs listed in the Registry of OA Repositories (http://roar.eprints.org), 143 (~16%) are in DCs. The low cost of establishing IRs means that this route to OA is affordable and manageable by DCs.
But are these resources being used by the research community in the DCs? Are they making a difference? I reported on figures for OA journal usage from Bioline International and SciELO, leaving Dr D K Sahu to report on usage of journals published by MedKnow in India.
Some statistics: The usage of journals from 17 different DC countries using the Bioline distribution system is impressive. The following table shows that in 2006, 2.5 million requests for full text articles were received, and 2007 figures show a continuing upward trend.
Similar usage figures are obtained for Latin American ScIELO journals, as the article downoload chart from Chile shows, below.
Statistics from the OA Indian biomedical journal service, MedKnow, Mumbai, show similarly impressive figures for usage of articles, for increased impact factors, for submissions (both Indian and international), and even for increased subscriptions since conversion to OA. Income is derived from sales of printed copies, services to publishers, advertisements – and it is notable that author charges are not made and do not contribute to financial viability of the journals, since this would clearly be a burden to authors from the developing world.
MedKnow statistics:
Article submissions
Downloads and visitors
Effect of OA (begun in 2002) on subscriptions
The upward trend of all these parameters continue through to 2007 and can be requested from the service providers.
The GeoMaps show that usage comes both from the developing and developed world, indicating a powerful usage of free research findings by scientific communities in the otherwise information-deprived countries, and a parallel interest from international research communities for information generated in the developing regions. This is a very healthy trend, since the resolution of climate change problems and the containment and treatment of infectious pandemics requires access to local knowledge if appropriate programmes are to be devised.
I heard recently a comment from an EU university business department who thought that OA in DCs had ‘fizzled out’. If this is the fizzling out of a damp squib, I cannot imagine what a skyward rocket would reveal. DCs are lapping up OA resources, but there is clearly more awareness raising and advocacy to be done.
Developments in Africa, as provided by Eve Gray, OSI and University of Cape Town, show a number of initiatives now underway in the continent that can be expected to begin to impact in 2008. In addition we heard from FAO of the new initiatives to set up IRs and encourage the provision of access to FAO information on an OA basis. It will be very encouraging if the UN agencies accelerate the use of OA resources in this way. However, one of the 20 in our audience felt that the UN donor programmes (AGORA, HINARI, OARE) were merely tools for partner publishers and that usage of their programmes was low.
Of concern, and focussing still on UN attitudes to sharing research data and publications, a paper by Illaria Capua, Italy, described the terrible effects of avian influenza on communities in the developing nations where the poultry industry and rural farming have been devastated. Her laboratory successfully isolated the H5N1 virus from Africa and wanted to deposit the sequence data in Genbank, but was asked to deposit it in a controlled access WHO database. She was applauded when she described her insistence on depositing the data in Genbank.
In the corridors: Another issue of concern to developing country publishers was gleaned ‘in the corridors’, where I learned that large western for-profit publishers have begun to contact the increasingly successful DC journals with a view to taking them over. This commercial activity is worrying since it is the DC scientists and publishers themselves that have raised the standard of the journals and made them attractive for take-over. It may be very difficult for hard-pressed DC organisations to resist tempting offers from large publishers, but we must hope they do not bow to these approaches, since the existence of a flourishing scientific publishing environment strengthens the science base of countries which, in turn, is recognised as being essential for the development of strong economies.
I hope this report will be of interest to BMC readers and that it shows the very positive impact that OA is having on DC science and, in this interconnected world, on us all. It is difficult to see how many of the Millennium Development Goals can be reached without free access to the world’s research findings and it seems to be widely accepted now that OA alone can significantly accelerate scientific progress and benefit the poorer 80% of the world. But there remains much to be done and the new BMC portal is a welcome and positive step forward.
Barbara Kirsop, Electronic Publishing Trust for Development
Statistics provided by Bioline International, http://www.bioline.org.br,
MedKnow Publications, http://www.medknow.com and SciELO http://www.scielo.org
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 13:43 Comments (0)
