Article Preview
TopKnowledge Is Power If We Share It
In an attempt to be an avid reader and a public health practitioner in a country like India, I have a habit to imbibe knowledge from online and offline publications apart from my field of interest of clinical epidemiology of injury. Still, many a times my students and juniors seek my suggestion with a request to help with the candid question, “Sir, how can I get the full version of the needed article”. I become dumbfounded like the poor parents of the third world, when they are asked by their kids to buy a book or pay fees to continue the study. In our country we have limited access to journals publications. Further, hard copy of the internationally reputed journals and books are a far cry. Even to distribute a journal article with copyright to a journal club, we ‘technically’ need permission from publishers. Translation is related to ‘Copyright’, so permissions are also required for the same if you try to translate the ‘clinical practice guidelines’ for the benefit of the mass even if any morbidity is known to affect culturally and linguistically diverse populations.
In these populations also there are unexplored potential intellectuals who can self-help to contribute from within their resource poor infrastructures.
Instead of the ‘value’, a good number of the publishing houses wish to realize the ‘price’ of research publications those necessitate utilization by the next researcher even from these poorer countries. In the era of the slogan ‘save the world’ we can reduce the overall cost of publication by as much ‘hard’ copy needed for preservation of the original edition as the electronic versions are the future. Further, in the open-access ‘great debate’, either authors or the readers have to pay as hardly institutional libraries of the developing countries have the policy of unlimited financial provision for the development of intellectual capacity to preserve the ever growing information base.