The chain of communication in health science: from researcher to health worker through open access.

Abstract

Globally, the public and private sectors spend billions of dollars each year on biomedical and health-related research. Yet in many parts of the world, health care systems are far from achieving the health outcomes targeted by the UN Millennium Development Goals The reasons for this disparity are complex, but one key factor that has been consistently identified is the failure to translate research into effective policy and practices. Not surprisingly, then, health agencies and funding bodies around the world are paying closer attention to what is now generally described as “knowledge translation,” developing mechanisms that “strengthen communication between health researchers and users of health knowledge, enhance capacity for knowledge uptake, and accelerate the flow of knowledge into beneficial health applications.”1 At the same time, research funding agencies are recognizing that a key component of the knowledge translation process is ensuring that the primary research resulting from their funding is shared as widely as possible. As Robert Terry, a former senior policy adviser at the Wellcome Trust, the largest private charitable medical funding agency in the UK, said, “Just funding the research is a job only half done. A fundamental part of [our] mission is to ensure the widest possible dissemination and unrestricted access to that research.”2 The Wellcome Trust believes that maximizing access to the research they fund will increase the health applications and benefits of that research. As a result, since 2005 the Trust has made it a condition that all those receiving grants must deposit electronic copies of journal articles resulting from Wellcome funding into the UK PubMed Central open access repository within 6 months of publication.3 One of the first groups to require deposit of articles in open access institutional repositories (IRs) was Research Councils UK, which includes the Medical Research Council. More recently, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest medical funding body, made it mandatory for researchers to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that result from NIH funding to PubMed Central. This requirement was made into law by the US Congress, which passed the Public Access Policy (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008).4 Likewise, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) enacted an open access policy requiring authors who received CIHR funding to make their publications openly available within 6 months of publication. In addition, CIHR grant recipients are required to deposit bioinformatics, as well as atomic and molecular coordinate data, into the appropriate public database immediately upon publication of research results (e.g., nucleic acid sequences must be deposited into GenBank).5 These are prominent examples of agencies who understand that [t]imely and unrestricted access to research findings is a defining feature of science, and is essential for advancing knowledge and accelerating our understanding of human health and disease.6 A total of 112 major research organizations and funding bodies have now made similar requirements and are listed in the Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies database, with a further 14 such mandates under development.7 (See Box 1 for a list of the websites of open access groups mentioned in this article.) It is recognized that restricted access to research publications imposed by cost and by copyright permission leads to inefficiency and delay in discovery, isolation of researchers and, above all, a broken link between researchers and the research users. Funding organizations are increasingly requiring that those applying for funding provide the website addresses of publications deposited in IRs, since funders do not always have subscriptions to all the journals holding articles of potential applicants.8 Since research users include not only other researchers but also policy- and decision-makers, front-line health workers, NGOs and members of the public, open access for everyone is vital to the overall success of the knowledge exchange process, as it vastly expands the opportunities for translating health research into improved public health. Box 1 Groups mentioned in this article The remainder of this article further expands on the public health benefits of open access, points to strategies for making publications accessible and reusable, provides examples of successes so far and concludes with recommendations on how best to maximize the return on investment for health research.

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