Voices from the community:
Accessing medical information
Dr. John Willinsky makes the case for open access to research publications.
When we learn we have a particular health condition or disease, most of us seek more information. Increasingly, we search for this knowledge online. Unfortunately, a great deal of information on the Internet is unreliable—anybody with computer access can publish anything they like online, accurate or not. Ironically, in this digital age, the most accurate sources for the latest scientific news and research are often unavailable to the public. Peer-reviewed scientific journals, where scientists publish their research findings, are priced far beyond what many people can afford, and few of these journals are available free of charge online.
Dr. John Willinsky protests that this should not be the case. "Many complain that the health information online is so questionable. I say, of course it is. Only a very small proportion of the good medical research has been made freely available online."
The professor of literacy and technology is an outspoken champion of open access. which he defines as the publication of research in scholarly journals, available online, without additional fees such as subscription or pay-per-view. According to Dr. Willinsky, open access responds to the public's increasing expectations around access to knowledge. "The public have already shown considerable interest in medical research, and we have to get in line with them," he says. The point can also be made that the public has a right to access this research. "The research itself is paid for in good measure by taxpayers or through foundations committed to the public good, so the public's interest in seeing the results from this research makes a kind of ethical and logical sense."
Open access also makes good sense for researchers, libraries, and policy-makers. It allows researchers' work to be read by more people, including physicians, academics in developing countries, and advocacy groups. Open access assists libraries in making the more than 24,000 existing research journals accessible to researchers and others. (Many of these publications have excessive subscription prices—Brain Research tops the list of expensive journals at more than $21,000 US per year.) It also helps make research available to healthcare policy-makers for use in developing new initiatives. In short, open access helps get research knowledge off the shelf and into the hands of those who can use it to make a difference in people's lives.
Of course, not everyone thinks that open access is a good thing. The obvious detractors are those who publish research journals, who may see it as a threat to a well-established publishing industry. "In the academic community, there has long been a particular knowledge economy around publishing that is based on print, on limited circulations, and on the real costs of copy-editing, layout, and distribution," explains Dr. Willinsky. "In the shift to online distribution and online access, we need to find new economic models, as some of these factors have changed."
Many journals and publishers are already adapting. The New England Journal of Medicine makes all of its articles available free of charge six months after they are initially published and made available to subscribers. HighWire Press (a division of the Stanford University Libraries) publishes more than 1,000 journals and has already made 1.6 million articles from these journals available at no cost. PubMed Central and the Public Library of Science also provide free access to many journal articles. Yet there is a long way to go. Dr. Willinsky estimates that only 15% to 20% of the research literature published in journals has also been made available through open access.
Enter the granting agencies. AHFMR and many other research funders are developing policies to make research publications as accessible as possible. In the meantime, Dr. Willinsky suggests that researchers can take up the challenge themselves: many publishers allow the authors of a paper to make the publication available to the institutional repositories at their universities (a sort of digital library). "The public's rising expectations around the right to know is the critical factor," he concludes, "and I think the public has a right to this information."
As you might expect, Dr. Willinsky walks the talk when it comes to this issue. His recently published book on open access is available free of charge online.