Open Access as a Healthcare Investment

Here’s part of a new post from Tin Knežević at The Right to Research Coalition:

Perhaps you are lucky, and the university you studied at had full access to research journals and up-to-date research data. And you were probably not aware of any related costs. In which case – wow!

But if you are reading this, you have probably come across articles you cannot open, data you cannot reach, and information you cannot access. Most probably it was both new as well as interesting. Most probably, it would have helped you with your research and made your results more relevant. And most probably you were surprised by the fact that you did not have access to it and wished it was open to the public… (Continue reading)

Mr. Knežević echoes much of what I heard at the Berlin9 Open Access conference last month: as data and research are opened for anybody to read, use, and modify, tough problems – such as disease or lack of safe water or writing a new national constitution (see Iceland) – are broken down and tackled much more quickly.

The Right to Research Coalition “was “founded by students in the summer of 2009 to promote an open scholarly publishing system based on the belief that no student should be denied access to the articles they need because their institution cannot afford the often high cost of access.”