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 · Some 200 publishers worldwide participate in Research4Life and no publisher has withdrawn from the partnership since the programmes began.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