In my opinion the main thing wrong with HINARI is, that it is not dealing with Open Access. HINARI is primarily about restricted access to knowledge, where the North keeps control over the South.

In HINARI powerful Toll Access publishers control the flow of information from the north to the south, and it has much more to do with the preservation of conventional publishing businesses than with sharing of information in order to promote development. For instance with regards to the withdrawal of free access to 2,500 medical journals for Bangladesh, Kimberly Parker, programme manager at HINARI, said that the decision to withdraw free access was not unusual practice once publishers start to secure “active sales” in a country.

To me this has all the looks of HINARI as a mere marketing vehicule for publishers. another example of the control that the publishers exert on what exactly is “free” available through HINARI is the case of Javier Villafuerte-Gálvez and colleagues, who discuss the frustration they have experienced with HINARI in a piece entitled “Biomedical Journals and Global Poverty: Is HINARI a Step Backwards?” The authors are based in Peru, a country that is excluded from free access via HINARI. Non-profit institutions in Peru can pay $1000 per year for HINARI access, but the authors say that online access to major science journals via HINARI “is not as accessible as hoped. They were told: “We could not access any of the top five journals from major publishers such as Nature and Elsevier-Science Direct. In other words, from the Nature Publishing Group we had no access to Nature Reviews Cancer, Nature Reviews Immunology, Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, Nature, or Nature Medicine, and from Elsevier ScienceDirect we had no access to Cell, Cancer Cell, Current Opinion in Cell Biology, Immunity, or Molecular Cell. In addition, we could not access any of the first-level journals from Blackwell, Oxford Press University, Lippincott Williams and Wilkins, or Wiley and Sons. In 2003, all these journals were available.”

Another important point is that HINARI only grants free access to non-profit institutions (not to individuals) in certain countries. If you’re an individual clinician, researcher, or teacher who cannot access one of these approved non-profit institutions, you can not make use of HINARI. In addition many countries in the developing world are barred from HINARI because they don’t fulfill the strict criteria of the organization.

By far the most compelling argument against HINARI is the fact that HINARI users based in non-profit
institutions in those countries that qualify for free access, are banned from reusing the literature, and thus the HINARI project simply does not meet the definition of open access. As coordinator of the @ccess initiative I want to emphasize the point that we adhere to the single definition of open access as free and completely unrestricted access to information as desrcribed by the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI).Traditional, restrictive copyright laws apply to the articles that can be accessed via HINARI: the project prohibits readers from reproducing, sharing, or translating the materials—a particularly severe obstacle in countries in which Internet access is unreliable.

This basic difference between free Access as provided by HINARI and Open Access means, that HINARI effectively prevents scientists in developing countries from participating in the scientific enterprise and in doing so it also obstructs the road to development, innovation and prosperity for those countries.

Open Access on the other hand, is all about participation, free sharing, reusing of information. For this to become a reality,the traditional toll access publishing business has to be replaced by an open access publishing infrastructure. In a recent blog, Eve Grayprogramme director of the Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme , wrote “the question [is] of whether we are seeking access to or participation in the production of global literature. Which policy path would most effectively give voice to research from Africa, largely silenced in the current system? Access to world literature is also important, but is inadequate on its own, risking perpetuating a neo-colonial dispensation that casts the dominant North as the producer and the developing world as the consumer of knowledge. And a bit further, she goes on to say that “While the road to prestige and rankings is delivered largely through the commercial journal system, the way to social and development impact is surely through open access”.

This is also my point: open access to all scientific publications is the only way that we can ensure that scientists from developing countries can participate fully in the shaping of science, establishing their own priorities and make use of all the opportunities that come with having access to up-to-date information. This will make all the difference in the world in the battle against poverty and diseases and also against corruption and mal-governing especially for people in the developing countries.

I agree with Dr Knols regarding the importance of making scientific publications freely accessible to scientists in developing countries. There are a number of ways Elsevier helps achieve this. First of all, as has been noted here by Richard Gedye, Research4Life (of which HINARI is a major component) provides free or low cost access to thousands of institutions in developing countries. Elsevier was a founding partner and is the biggest contributor of content (with over 3.1 million downloads last year alone).

We also offer other initiatives to promote access to research on malaria. Two years ago, Elsevier launched the Malaria Nexus (http://www.malarianexus.com/) website which aims to provide free access to much of the latest research on malaria published in Elsevier’s leading journals. Every month, approximately 20 articles published in Elsevier’s journals are made freely available to registered members (registration to the website is also free). Since its launch, Malaria Nexus has made over 200 articles freely accessible to the malaria community, including all the latest high-impact malaria publications from our top journals: The Lancet, The Lancet Infectious Diseases, Cell Host & Microbes and Trends in Parasitology. Articles are selected by me, a PhD holding molecular parasitologist by training, and by recommendation by our Editors, themselves leaders in the malaria research community. Moreover, news items about the latest malaria-related developments/events and interviews with key leaders in the field are also frequently posted on the website and are available for free.

In addition to Malaria Nexus, Elsevier last year launched The International Journal for Parasitology : Drugs and Drug Resistance (IJP:DDR) (http://www.journals.elsevier.com/international-journal-for-parasitology-drugs-and-drug-resistance/). IJP:DDR is an open access journal that publishes work on drug identification, development and evaluation, and parasite drug resistance and as such has featured many articles on malaria, written by leading researchers.

I believe that with initiatives such as Malaria Nexus and IJP:DDR, we are addressing the need to ensure that Elsevier’s leading content is freely accessible to the malaria research community in developing countries. We will have further information resources launched in the next few months.

Paul-André Genest, PhD
Managing Editor, Malaria Nexus and IJP:DDR
Elsevier

My interest was aroused partly in the context of my previous 20-year experience working with the scientific journals programme of a prominent University Press and partly in the context of my current role managing publisher participation in the HINARI programme on behalf of the international Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM).

Bart rightly points out that recovering the costs of publication from either authors or readers may be a workable model in the more developed world, but is more problematical in the developing world, and so I am delighted that he has managed to launch his Malaria World Journal with grant funding which will cover the cost of publishing the first 90 articles at no cost to either authors or readers. I do hope that this arrangement works out to be sustainable over the longer term. Over my 20 university press years we found that recovering publishing costs from grants was occasionally viable for a start up, but that most grant arrangements were either offered explicitly as one-offs or were vulnerable to changes in key staff, policies, or funding priorities at the relevant funding organisation. One medical research open access journal which we launched in 2004 with grant funding that allowed us to offer free access to both authors and readers, had to revert to the more conventional open access model of levying author publication charges a few years later when the grant was not renewed.

My experience to date is that that recovering publication costs from either authors (and their funders) or readers (and their institutions) tends to be both more scalable and more sustainable. In which case it is clearly desirable for “northern” hemisphere publishers to put in place cross-subsidy arrangements whereby revenue from authors and readers in wealthier countries underwrites publication or subscription costs for those in poorer countries. To the best of my knowledge all the major open access publishers offer to waive author publication charges for authors in developing countries, while all the major subscription publishers of scientific research participate in the HINARI scheme for providing free or deeply discounted access to their published research in the developing world.

Every model for recovering publication costs has its strengths and weaknesses and the HINARI programme, like any other charitable endeavour, is not perfect as Bart rightly points out. It is unfortunate, nevertheless, that his comments on HINARI’s gap between “good” and “perfect” could lead less well-informed readers to the conclusion that HINARI has been by and large a failure in its 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 X index readers have interpreted Bart’s comments about HINARI as implying that the programme has had a negligible effect on increasing Low and Middle Income Country access to important scientific research, it is perhaps worth highlighting some of its achievements in the past 10 or more years:-

• HINARI brings the contents of more than 8,500 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 5000 institutions are registered for access to content available through HINARI.
• 71 of the HINARI journals are specifically focussed on infectious diseases and a search across all the HINARI journals on the term “malaria” returns over 24,000 results, the most recent of which (Artemisinin-resistant Plasmodium falciparum in Pursat province, western Cambodia: a parasite clearance rate study) was published in the Lancet Infectious Diseases just three days ago.
• A survey which formed part of a 2010 commissioned review of the user experience of HINARI 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.
• More than 150 publishers worldwide participate in HINARI and no publisher has withdrawn from the programme since it began in 2002.

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 (http://www.research4life.org/competitionbook), which provides some examples of how access to HINARI-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 HINARI has been bringing access now, with demonstrable benefits delivered now – when they are needed.

HINARI’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 and Yale Universities as well as in more than 150 scientific publishers worldwide (both profit and non-profit). We know we are not perfect and we know that there is more to be done to raise awareness of HINARI among beneficiary communities and potential beneficiary communities, and supplementing that awareness with further training in information literacy skills. We wish Bart all the best with his own endeavours and we hope, that while criticising ours when resource and other issues means that it fails to achieve all its goals immediately, he may also see fit to mention, on his clear and impressively designed Malaria World web site, that the full text of many of the thousands of its links to original research published in subscription based journals is available to many in the developing world if they first log in their HINARI account or register for an account if they do not already have one.

Regards
Partho