83 Developing Countries are Barred from Free Access in HINARI

by Gavin Yamey (2008-07-23)

  

Maurice Long, in his response to my paper [1], misses the point. I argue that we should all heed the United Nations’ call for universal open access to the biomedical literature [2,3]. In other words, all research papers should be universally free to read and free to reuse for legal purposes. Such open access would, I propose in my paper, have profound benefits worldwide to health professionals, patients, policymakers, teachers, activists, and the wider public. There are at least 4 reasons why HINARI is very far away indeed from providing such open access.

First, it bars a huge number of developing countries from free access. Using the International Monetary Fund’s list of developing countries from the April 2008 World Economic Outlook Report [4], I counted 83 countries that do not qualify for free access to journals via HINARI. Many of these countries are struggling with abject poverty, poverty-related ill health, and even violent political conflict, and the lack of access to the biomedical research literature is arguably compounding these problems. The physician who I talk about in the opening of my paper is based in South Africa—HINARI is of no use to him since South Africa is barred from the HINARI project. As are Botswana, Swaziland, India, Pakistan, Guatemala, Brazil, Indonesia, Peru, Iraq, and 73 other developing countries.

Second, HINARI only grants free access to non-profit institutions (not to individuals) in certain countries. If you’re an individual clinician, researcher, or teacher who cannot access one of these approved non-profit institutions, you cannot reap any benefits from HINARI.

Third, such institutions must agree to abide by the rules of the Berne convention on the protection of literary and artistic works [5]. Therefore HINARI users based in non-profit institutions in those countries that qualify for free access are banned from reusing the literature, and thus the HINARI project simply does not meet the definition of open access [6]. Traditional, restrictive copyright laws apply to the articles that can be accessed via HINARI: the project prohibits readers from reproducing, sharing, or translating the materials—a particularly severe obstacle in countries in which Internet access is unreliable.

Fourth, I regularly hear from colleagues in the developing world that journal access via HINARI is unreliable or, worse still, slowly disappearing. For example, Javier Villafuerte-Gálvez and colleagues in a piece entitled “Biomedical Journals and Global Poverty: Is HINARI a Step Backwards?” discuss the frustration they have experienced with HINARI [7]. The authors are based in Peru, a country that is excluded from free access via HINARI. Non-profit institutions in Peru can pay $1000 per year for HINARI access, but the authors say that online access to major science journals via HINARI “is not as accessible as hoped for and, in fact, is getting worse.” In April 2007, the authors conducted a review of the first 150 science journals available through HINARI with the highest impact factors on the Science Citation Index. They write:

“We could not access any of the top five journals from major publishers such as Nature and Elsevier-Science Direct. In other words, from the Nature Publishing Group we had no access to Nature Reviews Cancer, Nature Reviews Immunology, Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, Nature, or Nature Medicine, and from Elsevier ScienceDirect we had no access to Cell, Cancer Cell, Current Opinion in Cell Biology, Immunity, or Molecular Cell. In addition, we could not access any of the first-level journals from Blackwell, Oxford Press University, Lippincott Williams and Wilkins, or Wiley and Sons. In 2003, all these journals were available.”

The recent loss of access via HINARI to many key biomedical journals in Peru, they conclude, “could be a step backwards.”

Given all of these limitations, I stand by my statement that HINARI is “a step in the right direction” but also “a very long way from providing universal open access.”

References
1:http://www.hhrjournal.org/index.php/hhr/comment/view/20/88/2
2:UN Millennium Project, Task Force on Science, Technology and Innovation, Innovation: Applying Knowledge in Development (London: Earthscan Publishing, 2005). Available at http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/documents/Science-complete.pdf.
3: Declaration of Principles, Building the Information Society: A Global Challenge in the new Millennium (December 12, 2003) (“Geneva Declaration of Principles”). Available at http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/geneva/official/dop.html.
4:http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2008/01/weodata/groups.htm#oem
5:http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/trtdocs_wo001.html
6:http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm
7:Villafuerte-Gálvez J, Curioso WH, Gayoso O (2007) Biomedical Journals and Global Poverty: Is HINARI a Step Backwards? PLoS Med 4(6): e220, doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0040220