A Blog Around The Clock

Yes, I know, Gavin is a dear colleague and a friend, but his latest article, Excluding the poor from accessing biomedical literature: A rights violation that impedes global health, is just brilliant. A must-read for all concerned with healthcare, medical information and OA publishing:

In this article, I take a rights-based view of this current crisis of restricted access to the results of scientific and medical research. Such research is conducted in the interests of the public, and yet the results are largely kept out of the public domain by traditional corporate publishers who own them, subject them to extremely tight copyright restrictions, and sell them in a market worth about US$5 billion. The results of biomedical research have unfortunately been privatized, monopolized, and concentrated in the hands of a tiny number of multinational corporations.

This article considers how exclusion from accessing the biomedical research literature harms global public health. I argue that this literature should be considered a global public good and base my argument upon long-standing and recent international declarations that enshrine access to scientific and medical knowledge as a human right. I present an emerging alternative publishing model, called open access, and argue that this model is a more socially responsive and equitable approach to knowledge dissemination. I situate open access publishing within a broader movement that has emerged in the digital era to create a public "knowledge commons," which can play a crucial role in supporting an informed citizenry in its efforts to promote human rights. Finally, I propose that Health and Human Rights itself, as an open access journal, could help to catalyze the creation of an online "health and human rights commons."