Fitzgerald, Anne M. and Hooper, Neale (2009) A review of the literature on the legal aspects of open access policy, practices and licensing in Australia and selected jurisdictions. [Review]

The Open Archives Forum provided a Europe-based focus for dissemination of information about European activity related to open archives and, in particular, to the Open Archives Initiative. The aim of the Forum was to facilitate clustering of IST projects, national initiatives and other parties interested in the open archives approach. In order to do so, the Forum brought interested parties together to build a community of interest, enable exchange of information and establish a web-based European information source for open archives. In addition, the Forum undertook comparative reviews of technical and organisational issues.

The Access to Research for Development and Innovation (aRDi) program is coordinated by the World Intellectual Property Organization together with its partners in the publishing industry with the aim to increase the availability of scientific and technical information in developing countries. By improving access to scholarly literature from diverse fields of science and technology, the aRDi program seeks to: * reinforce the capacity of developing countries to participate in the global knowledge economy; and * support researchers in developing countries in creating and developing new solutions to technical challenges faced on a local and global level. Currently, 12 publishers provide access to over 50 journals for 107 developing countries through the aRDi program.

Objective To understand belief in a specific scientific claim by studying the pattern of citations among papers stating it. Design A complete citation network was constructed from all PubMed indexed English literature papers addressing the belief that β amyloid, a protein accumulated in the brain in Alzheimer’s disease, is produced by and injures skeletal muscle of patients with inclusion body myositis. Social network theory and graph theory were used to analyse this network. Main outcome measures Citation bias, amplification, and invention, and their effects on determining authority. Results The network contained 242 papers and 675 citations addressing the belief, with 220 553 citation paths supporting it. Unfounded authority was established by citation bias against papers that refuted or weakened the belief; amplification, the marked expansion of the belief system by papers presenting no data addressing it; and forms of invention such as the conversion of hypothesis into fact through citation alone. Extension of this network into text within grants funded by the National Institutes of Health and obtained through the Freedom of Information Act showed the same phenomena present and sometimes used to justify requests for funding. Conclusion Citation is both an impartial scholarly method and a powerful form of social communication. Through distortions in its social use that include bias, amplification, and invention, citation can be used to generate information cascades resulting in unfounded authority of claims. Construction and analysis of a claim specific citation network may clarify the nature of a published belief system and expose distorted methods of social citation.

Trojan horse?

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

will open access build a bridge to reduce health inequity? The potential is certainly great but the digital divide remains large, with estimates that only 13% of the developing world use the Internet, often on slow and expensive connections.9 Therefore, the inequity in accessing information and communication technology infrastructure will need to improve to allow people to get a foot onto the information bridge. But even once they are there, they will still only be able to access information that has been paid for – even when that information was created using taxpayers’ money. There is a role for more research funders and donors to support open access as an integral cost of undertaking the research itself to ensure public access.10