Partnering to promote research where it matters

Edward Kamau has gone far in his career, earning a PhD in parasitology and a position with the World Health Organization (WHO) Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, or TDR. But he also remembers the challenges he faced as a university student in Kenya in the 1980s. “If you’re bright, you’ll get a government scholarship and your bachelor’s degree—but after that, it’s almost like hitting a brick wall,” he says. While the careers of many of his peers stalled because of limited opportunities, Kamau was talented and fortunate enough to connect with support for postgraduate training in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Kenya. Today, Kamau (Fig 1) is one of many from his generation who are helping other scientists to excel and building research capacity in lowand middle-income countries (LMICs). The past decades have seen remarkable strides, with traditional “north–south” partnerships, in which Western scientists convey expertise and training to their developing world counterparts, increasingly giving way to regionally based capacity-building efforts and “south–south” collaborations that forge direct alliances between LMIC research communities. Budding researchers also have greater opportunities to read widely, publish, and promote their work, facilitated by a flourishing community of open-access journals that strive to eliminate cost barriers for LMIC scientists. For example, the number of research articles with African authors tripled between 2003 and 2013 [1]. The change is especially striking for neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), which previously languished in the shadow of better-known tropical diseases like malaria. “When I started my work in lymphatic filariasis, the question was, do you really want to have a career?” recalls John Gyapong, Vice Chancellor at the University of Health and Allied Sciences in Ho, Ghana . Aggressive advocacy has put NTDs on the map, however, and there are now a variety of dedicated research programs and widely-read open-access journals specializing in NTDs—of which PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases (PLOS NTDs)was the first, with a dedicated mission to promote work from LMIC researchers. “We’ve branded these diseases and put them into the context of poverty alleviation,” says David Molyneux of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine . “The future is going to be about building capacity for NTDs and recognizing that we’re talking about a broader problem of sustainable development.”