Someone else who likes to have numbers to answer questions.

Studies have shown that access to published health research by the research communities in developing countries is no longer “fit for purpose”.2 As has been well documented, rising costs of subscriptions and permission barriers imposed by publishers have barred access to the extent that local health research and health care have been damaged through lack of information.3,4 For example, Yamey5 tells of a physician in southern Africa who could not afford full access to journals but based a decision to alter a perinatal HIV prevention programme on one single abstract. The full text article would have shown that the findings were not relevant to the country’s situation. With the advent of the internet there is little justification for continuing to create barriers to access. Richard Smith, as the former editor of the British Medical Journal, said, “Most research is publicly funded, and when the internet appeared it made no sense for research funders to allow publishers to profit from restricting access to their research”.6 This is true not only for publicly funded research but for private health charities around the world. As the Open Access Policy of the Wellcome Trust states, “We . . . support unrestricted access to the published output of research as a fundamental part of its charitable mission and a public benefit to be encouraged wherever possible”.7 Science is a collaborative process and openness is fundamental to knowledge advancement.

Impaired access to research information in health-related fields is not solely the preserve of developing countries but it is hugely exacerbated in poorer regions of the world. While these regions bear the brunt of the world’s health problems, only 10% of health research effort goes into these areas (referred to as the “10/90 gap”).1 If we are going to achieve what the World Conference on Science held by UNESCO and the International Council for Science in 1999 termed the true “orienting of scientific progress towards meeting the needs of humankind”, then we must improve the research effort on the health problems that afflict the greatest part of the world’s population. That cannot happen until research communication is optimized: at the turn of the new millennium more than half of research-based institutions in lower-income countries had no current subscriptions at all to international research journals.2

In the months since passage of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) mandatory public access policy in late December of 2007, the number of submissions to the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) PubMed Central (PMC) repository, where authors are now required to deposit their NIH-funded research papers, has risen significantly. According to NIH statistics, submissions to PMC began steadily rising in December 2007, soon after it became clear a mandatory policy would be adopted in 2008. By the first month following passage of the new policy, January 2008, monthly submissions to PMC hit an all-time high of 1255, and have continued to increase significantly every month so far this year. In April 2008, when the policy officially took effect, submissions spiked even more sharply, rising from 1852 total submissions in March, to 2,765 in April and 2,593 in May. The April/May 2008 figures represent well over double the number of submissions for the same months in 2007 (1,198 PMC submissions in April ’07; 948 in May ’07). Although official figures for June have not yet been posted, the NIH’s Dr. David Lipman told the LJ Academic Newswire the submission totals were higher than May. It’s still too early to compute compliance rates, Lipman noted, but the early returns suggest a stunning turnaround. “Looking at the increase in submissions and the dramatic increase in journals signing PMC Publisher Participation agreements,” Lipman suggested a “reasonable projection” would be a compliance rate “around 55-60 percent.” Adoption of the “mandatory” NIH policy was spurred by abysmal compliance rates under the NIH’s first public access policy, adopted in 2005, which, after considerable pushback from publishers opposed to a deposit mandate, was scaled back to a voluntary policy at the 11th hour. In February, 2006, NIH reported to congress that compliance rates under the voluntary policy lagged around four percent. SPARC executive director Heather Joseph told the LJ Academic Newswire she expected PMC deposits to remain strong, a

In 2007-2008 a research team at Hanken developed an emperical method to measure the total amount of peer reviewed articles published globally as well as their OA availability. In this project they will renew and further develop the study as well as carry out a regional study of the Nordic countries. The Nordic part of the study will answer the following questions: * What share of scientific articles published in the Nordic countries is available open access? * What portion of the output of Nordic scholars is available as open access? * The project will also construct a list of the between 500-1000 scholary journals that are published in the Nordic countries and check their total article output as well as which part is available open access. The project can also see what kind of impact the establishment of institutional repositories in the Nordic countries has on the open access availabelity of Nordic scholary output. The target results of the project is a precise measure of how large a share of the overall volume of scientific journal litterature is available openly. By repeating a study from 2008 it will be possible to see trends concerning a possible increase in OA. The results concerning the Nordic journals and their open access availability would be interesting information for all participants in the OA discussion. Hanken and Lund university library are commited to repeating the study in 2011.

This is the hearing where Zerhouni estimated the NIH support for publication charges at 80 to 100 million/year