Open scholarly communications and international cooperation: equity in Bioethics publishing

Abstract

In recent decades, scholarly communications (the exchange of peer reviewed knowledge and research information) has been transformed by the availability of Web-based publishing. Ostensibly, this change should make the delivery of bioethics literature faster and cheaper. Publishers, libraries, and readers are no longer facing the burden of shipping expensive materials to remote locations. Government initiatives, such as the U.S. National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy and the World Health Organization HINARI Programme, represent significant efforts to take advantage of these changes by reducing or removing price barriers to electronic biomedical literature for readers in developing countries. These policies are supplemented by the growth of open-access publishing—a growth that is increasingly distributed around the world. For example, 61% of the 445 new open-access journals released in the Western hemisphere during 2012 were published in Central and South America. At the same time, the availability of Internet access and the use of mobile information devices continue to spread. Yet international barriers to the bioethics literature remain stubbornly in place. Preliminary analysis of bioethics literature indexed in PubMed Medline shows that the journal literature is, in large part, closed to readers without the resources to pay for rising subscription costs (open access quotient: bioethics = 7%). This inequity may be exacerbated in the future as the “author-pays” or “Gold Open Access” model of publishing accelerates. Thus, even as advocates work to make bioethics literature more accessible, the culture of academic publishing may continue to disadvantage contributions from developing economies. In international research ethics, this means that bioethicists in these economies will increasingly be able to read about the ethical challenges of biomedical research in their communities, but, at the same time, become more and more marginalized in the scholarly debate. In this paper, we propose that Article 15(4) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) (codifying Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), provides a principled basis for changing the culture of scholarly publishing in bioethics. Article 15(4) recognizes the importance of “international contacts and cooperation in the scientific and cultural fields.” Current publishing trends militate against the development of forums in which issues of common (if not global) concern can be debated by an internationally diverse community of bioethicists. By enabling robust discussions of ethical issues within the “pages” of individual open-access journals, bioethicists could align their publishing market with their principles.