This story has been picked up internationally and there seems to be considerable concern that the there is no transparency about the research on which these results are founded and that the figures that are cited are contradictory and their source dubious. Most of all, it seems that this press release, which is being broadly circulated, is being presented as if it is the outcome of a serious research project, when that does not appear to be the case.
Also, this article makes no mention at all of the growth of open access journals in this field and the impact that they are having in providing access and growing developing country participation in scholarly communications in a more democratic way. And of course OA publishing is probably strongest in the biomedical field. It is telling that yesterday I picked up on a report that PLOS One is about to become the biggest biomedical journal around and then a week or so ago that JMIR has hit the top ISI ranking in its field Although the journal access programmes like HINARI are of great value to the universities that have access to them (and the determination of who gets access is a problem in itself), there are serious problems, too. These are commercial companies for whom the bottom line is the important thing and this press release is a piece of PR work. In the last day or two, Blade Nzimande has said at UNESCO that he is concerned at the low profile of African research dissemination, so I think we also need to look to ways of getting our own research out through our own channels. I hope that we can take advantage of the Minister's concern to get across the need for more support for local research publication and that not only in journals. http://www.who.int/entity/hinari/Increase_in_developing_country_research_output.pdf
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Eve Gray
mailto:Eve.Gray@uct.ac.za