Access Denied

to state-of-the-art environmental health studies, public health research, and clinical medical practices is a major problem in developing countries. To compound the problem, the information found in international journals is often not relevant to the developing world (Richards 2004). National and regional journals attempt to fill the void by publishing robust and relevant information. However, these journals face difficulties in sustainability and local access (Ofori-Adjai 2006). There are many reasons for the inaccessibility to both information coming out of the developed world and the developing world itself. For example, subscriptions to international journals often present a financial barrier, whereas regional journals often are poorly supported and face difficult distribution problems. How can developing countries improve the health of their populations when they are effectively removed from the stream of knowledge from the developed world and their own region? The solutions include free access to the world's literature on health care and assistance in developing their research capabilities, publication processes, and distribution methods. Why should the developed world care about this issue? There is a moral imperative: I consider access to information to facilitate adequate health care a human right. An immediate impact of accessibility would be improvements in local clinical practice. In the long term, policy makers would be able to use knowledge-based decision making in formulating laws to help improve public health in their countries. There are global benefits for disseminating information in and from developing countries (Hryhorczuk 2006). First, because diseases and pollution are not constrained by geographic or political boundaries, the developed world would gain from, for example, improved access to information on infectious diseases that could affect their populations. Second, in regard to pollutants, conditions in developing countries often provide research opportunities that benefit both developed and developing countries. Finally, sharing information is good foreign policy for developed nations. Major steps have been taken to overcome some of the problems associated with improving the developing world's access to information available in international journals. For example, open access has been a growing trend within the publication industry. Many journals now have open access policies, including EHP (Goehl and Olden 2004), and others have embraced the spirit of open access but not fully implemented all of its provisions (i.e., free and immediate access to journal articles, as well as placing articles in a major digital archive). Many new open-access journals have been established in the last several years, …