An article by Keiser et al in this week's BMJ provides some evidence about the challenges facing authors in developing countries to get their research pubished in traditional journals. The paper finds a very low proportion of articles from developing world countries on a subject they might be expected to have special expertise in, and conclude that "Current collaborations should be transformed into research partnerships, with the goals of mutual learning and institutional capacity strengthening in the developing world."
The implication of this paper is that the argument that the author-pays model discriminates against third world authors is largely incorrect.
Reference: Representation of authors and editors from countries with different human development indexes in the leading literature on tropical medicine: survey of current evidence. Jennifer Keiser, Jürg Utzinger, Marcel Tanner, Burton H Singer BMJ 2004;328:1229-1232, doi:10.1136/bmj.38069.518137.F6 (published 1 April 2004)
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Health Perspectives at 5/21/2004 01:48:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
