From: Richard Gedye <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2012 05:30:26 +0200

No model for organising the funding, validation, promotion ,
distribution, and preservation of research output is perfect. All have
their strengths and their weaknesses and clearly advocates for one
particular model are, in their published advocacy, going to attempt to
highlight perceived weaknesses of competing models while keeping quiet
about any weaknesses in their own.

It is unfortunate, nevertheless, that the text cited by Richard
Poynder from  the EFT’s response to the Finch Report could lead less
well-informed readers to the conclusion that the Research4Life
Programmes have been by and large a failure in their mission to reduce
the knowledge gap between industrialized countries and developing
countries by providing free or very low cost access to critical
scientific research, including research from  journals whose current
business model seeks to recover the costs of their services via a
charge on readers or their institutions.

So in case any liblicense readers have interpreted the EFT’s brief
comments about Research4Life as implying that the partnership has had
a negligible effect on increasing LMIC access to important scientific
research,  it is perhaps worth highlighting some of its achievements
in the past 10 or more years:-

·       Research4Life brings the contents of nearly 10,000
peer-reviewed scientific journals and up to 7000 books to researchers
in the developing world. For 78 of the world’s poorest countries
subscription charges are waived, while for a further 28 countries they
are discounted by over 99%.

·       Over 6000 institutions are registered for access to content
available through Research4Life.

·       A survey which formed part of a 2010 commissioned review of
the user experience of the Research4Life programmes revealed that more
respondents (24%) cite HINARI as a source for life-science and medical
research than cite any other source, while more respondents (32%) cite
HINARI as the source they use most frequently. For agricultural
research, AGORA similarly tops the list of resources used, with
equivalent figures of 27% and 54% respectively.

·       Some 200 publishers worldwide participate in Research4Life and
no publisher has withdrawn from the partnership since the programmes
began.

Those for whom figures such as those above seem a little dry and
impersonal may like to look at our case studies booklet Making a
Difference,  which provides some examples of how access to
Research4Life-facilitated content has transformed the lives of
individuals and communities. Reading through these case studies again
brought home to me a simple truth: campaigning for free access to all
research output, courtesy of different business models which
reallocate the costs involved, may well bring benefits to the
developing world at some point in the future. But in the meantime
Research4Life has been bringing access now, with demonstrable benefits
delivered now -  when they are needed.

I was tempted, in response to EFT’s comments about Research4Life, to
claim that in posting this message I was adopting a “glass half full “
approach to "their glass half empty”. But to be honest I believe the
ratio is more 90%/10% in our favour. Still let’s look at that 10% as
expressed in EFT’s criticisms:-

        ‘There is no evidence of a lack of access,'

        ‘We have established the Research for Life programmes that
solve the problem’.

Green OA advocates may well see the world in pure black and white, but
at Research4Life we never make such sweeping statements. One statistic
that continues to spur us on is the 2010 research from the Publishing
Research Consortium  which shows that while 97% of researchers in the
USA and 94% in Europe find research articles in journals easy to
access, in poorer parts of the world that figure is just under 80%.
The research doesn’t reveal  to what extent this lower figure relates
to known technical issues like intermittent power supply and  low
bandwidth, but we know that there is work still to do, not only in
terms of increasing access but in terms of increasing awareness of the
availability of content and maximising the ability to leverage the
access gained in the cause of developing a solid culture of research,
political appreciation of its value, and therefore prioritisation of
its funding.

        ....problems with the Research4Life programmes have been well
documented — sudden withdrawal by publishers of journals, availability
only from designated libraries, selection of journals by publishers
rather than according to research needs and so on

Sudden withdrawal by publishers of journals:  Apart from the
occasional temporary withdrawal of access resulting from technical
issues which were subsequently resolved, and “withdrawals” that have
resulted when a publisher decides to supply access to a particular
country via one of the other developing country initiatives like INASP
or EIFL,  I suspect this is a reference to the event  last year when a
number of publishers withdrew their Research4Life content from a small
number of countries where they were anticipating alternative supply
mechanisms which did not materialise. As liblicense readers will
probably know, these withdrawals were subsequently reversed and remain
so.

Availability only from designated libraries:- Research4Life
beneficiary libraries embrace all institutions that we can think of
whose users have the potential to benefit from the specialist
scientific, agricultural, medical and technical research literature
that we provide and include, universities, colleges, hospitals,
community health centres, agricultural extension centres, patent
offices, national libraries and local NGOs.

Selection of journals by publishers rather than according to research
needs: because our Research4Life publishers do not know the detailed
research needs of every single one of the 6000 institutions we serve,
they tend to provide access to all of their scientific journals in the
areas covered by our four programmes. This is administratively
simpler, and in any case we feel it is better to oversupply with
journals and let institutions and their researchers have the run of
them all, rather than second guess the specific research needs of
individual institutions.

Research4Life’s  distribution of all this valuable content, and its
significant outreach efforts in the form of training in the use of the
material and the mechanisms for discovering it, is supported by teams
of committed and motivated individuals  within WHO, FAO, UNEP, WIPO,
Yale and Cornell Universities as well as in around 200 scientific
publishers worldwide (both profit and non-profit). Not only  is it
dispiriting for them to see their efforts belittled by inference in a
few glib sentences when they daily receive testimonials from
throughout the developing world to the power and value of their
efforts, but such casual put downs carry the risk of discouraging
support from partners and supporters in the developed world, to the
disadvantage of the growing number of beneficiaries whom  we have
spent the last ten years successfully striving to serve.

Richard Gedye

Director of Publishing Outreach Programmes

International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers

-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2012 20:03:22 +0100

The Electronic Publishing Trust for Development responds to the Finch Report.

Extract:

"It is difficult not to sound unprofessional and populist when
describing the huge imbalance between the importance of sharing
essential research and that of retaining the profits of the publishing
service industry, but publishing exists to support research, not the
other way round. The resolution to solve publishing deprivation via
the Gold route will take many years and significant financial input to
achieve, whereas the far smaller costs and ‘do-ability’ required to
set up repositories are immediately achievable. There are now

33,914,611 articles deposited in institutional repositories to date.

How can the importance of this strategy which has both scale and
momentum have been so trivialised by the Finch team?

"There is a myth circulated regarding developing country access
problems — ‘There is no evidence of a lack of access,' ‘We have
established the Research for Life programmes that solve the problem’.

. . But our decade-long experience working with researchers in the
South, and many of the stories collected for OA Week and which are
available from our web site demolishes the first myth, while the
problems with the R4L programmes have been well documented — sudden
withdrawal by publishers of journals, availability only from
designated libraries, selection of journals by publishers rather than
according to research needs and so on."

More here:

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/the-finch-report-and-its-implications.html

Richard Poynder