HOW RESEARCH4LIFE PROVIDES FREE AND LOW-COST ACCESS TO KNOWLEDGE

By Laura Peek

Elsevier, part of RELX, supports researchers in the developing world with free and low-cost access to knowledge through Research4Life. This is the story behind its success.

Raharman Tamang, 20, was using a circular saw to cut a steel rod at a metal shop in Bhaktapur, Nepal, when the rod snapped and impaled his brain partially paralyzing him. Frantic relatives rushed him to a nearby hospital where they were told it was not possible to treat him. A second hospital turned him away because there were no beds available in intensive care. Finally, four hours after the accident, he was admitted to a third.

“I was on call when the patient came in,” said neurosurgeon Pratyush Shrestha. “I was the most senior person present at the hospital, but it was a totally new case for me. So, while the patient was being prepared for surgery, I had to do a very quick literature review. I found an article on a similar case in India in Pubmed. Thanks to the full text I got via Research4Life, I was able to make a plan for the surgery.”

The surgery was successful and Raharman made a full recovery. Had Dr Shrestha not been able to access the article through Research4Life, the outcome might have been different. “Here we can’t pay for scientific journals which aren’t open access,” said the neurosurgeon, who plans to publish a paper about the case in a peer-reviewed journal — a reminder that access to research not only saves lives, it also leads to new research.

ACCESS TO RESEARCH

Research4Life has been providing free and low-cost access to scientific research for 20 years. It formed after a Kenyan researcher came into the World Health Organization (WHO) Library looking for a paper he had discovered on the internet. Librarian Barbara Aronson knew that doctors, scientists and students in the world’s poorest countries had insufficient access to peer-reviewed journals because they could not afford the subscriptions. She also knew this meant they could not contribute to the global scientific discourse without risk of research replication. The Kenyan researcher, who found the paper online from his office in Nairobi, gave her the idea that publishers — many of which were on the path to digitization — might be able to solve this problem. Together with Maurice Long from STM, the trade organization for academic publishers, she organized a meeting between six leading publishers and the WHO.

The publishers, which included Elsevier, Springer and Blackwell, gathered in New York with WHO representatives in 2000. As they studied a bar chart showing countries grouped by income, another librarian, Karen Hunter from Elsevier, part of RELX, pointed to the tallest bar showing the poorest nations and argued they should receive completely free access to scientific papers. The other five publishers agreed and, four months later, signed a statement of intent. Access to Research for Health (HINARI), which later became Research4Life, was born in 2001.

Press articles on the launch of HINARI, which then became Research4Life’s flagship program

Elsevier’s early migration from print to digital made sharing journals with developing nations possible. The digital transformation was pioneered by Hunter, who led initiatives from scanning journal content on to CD-ROMS in the 1980s to developing the company’s flagship online journal platform ScienceDirect.

Today, more than 200 publishers contribute to Research4Life, which is a public-private partnership that includes UN agencies and Yale and Cornell Universities. It now manages one of the world’s largest collections: more than 10,500 institutions in over 125 low and middle-income countries receive free or affordable access to over 151,000 peer-reviewed academic and professional resources.

The platform contains subscription journals, validated Open Access (OA) journals, e-books and research tools. Elsevier provides a quarter of the material, including over 3,000 journals, such as The Lancet and Cell, and 20,000 e-books. It also provides access to its Scopus, Embase, Mendeley and ClinicalKey platforms.

“Our goal is to foster a strong and independent research culture in the developing world — one that is fully integrated into the international research community,” said Ylann Schemm, who is Director of the Elsevier Foundation and Chair of the Executive Council of Research4Life. “Each year we have steadily increased the amount of content available to scientists while dedicating time to help develop the program. It basically runs on the commitment and passion of a small group of individuals.”

The company donates a considerable amount of staff time to making sure Research4Life, which operates on a shoestring, has the resources it needs. “Elsevier serves as an example in the voluntary time spent,” a Research4Life insider said. “And they are still the group that provides the largest amount of content.”

Research4Life is now integral to the company’s corporate responsibility program and its efforts to advance the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The 17 SDGs were introduced by the UN in 2015 as a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and reduce inequality. The aim is to achieve them by 2030 and research is regarded as a catalyst for progress. “An awful lot of these challenges are in developing countries,” added Schemm. “Researchers from the Global North can’t come in and solve them — they don’t have the local knowledge and expertise.”

Elsevier recently mapped the state of research within each of the SDGs in its report The Power of Data to Advance the SDGs. There were over 4m articles relating to specific SDGs published between 2015 and 2019. The most researched SDGs were those with strong relevance for industrialized nations, the report found. There was much less research activity relating to SDGs that seek to help the poorest. SDG 1 (End Poverty) had only 11,000 articles compared with SDG 3 (Good Health), which had over 3m. The report found most of the research was produced in high-income countries.

“The bulk of the production in science is coming from the Global North with very little coming from the South but many of the challenges we have now are global and the solutions need to be global — COVID-19 and climate change being examples,” said Gracian Chimwaza, who is Executive Director of the Information Training and Outreach Centre for Africa (ITOCA), which trains researchers across the continent to use Research4Life. “Equitable access to research resources and publishing opportunity is crucial.”

ACCESS TO PUBLISHING OPPORTUNITY

Access to publishing opportunity is the new frontier for Research4Life. Developing countries produce only a small proportion of the world’s research output. Between 1996 and 2018, Africa produced 1.5 percent of global scholarly output, Central, South and South-East Asia 1.8 percent and Latin America 3.7 percent (Scimago, 2020). As it turns 20, Research4Life is expanding its scope to help researchers from developing countries move from being just consumers of research to producers of knowledge as published authors.

The rise of Open Access (OA) helped researchers in the developing world access research but inadvertently created an obstacle for those who want to contribute research. OA journals have an author-pays business model whereas subscription journals charge readers. It can cost contributors between $3,000 and $4,000 to publish an article and this is often unaffordable for research institutions in the developing world. “Open-access publishing addressed the challenge around access to knowledge, said Andrea Powell, STM’s Outreach Director and Publisher Coordinator for Research4Life. “But it opened up a new challenge around access to publishing opportunity.”

Publishers offer article publishing charge (APC) waivers to researchers in the developing world, but these can be hard to find and can vary considerably from publisher to publisher or even journal to journal. Consequently, 75 percent of researchers in developing nations were still publishing in subscription journals in 2018, according to a white paper published by Elsevier and STM last year.

“One of the things we call for is greater clarity around open-access waivers,” said Powell, who co-authored the white paper. “It’s not a total solution but transparency and consistency around the way publishers communicate waivers is a good first step. After all, what is the point of having a waiver policy if people can’t find it?”

“There is also an issue of whether it is equitable to require users from particular countries to ask for waivers,” added Powell. “We’re trying to smooth the process — to make it more automatic and more clearly understood.”

Research4Life has set up an OA Task Force to develop a set of best practices to help publishers promote waivers and has compiled an index of publisher waiver policies, including Elsevier’s.

Under pressure to publish but unable to afford OA article publishing charges, researchers can turn to predatory journals, which charge lower fees. Predatory journals take advantage of authors by charging them to publish without offering peer-review or editing services. These journals are often poorly indexed online or not included in major abstracting and indexing databases, such as Scopus, limiting the visibility and credibility of contributors’ work. Early-career researchers from developing countries are particularly at risk.

“Researchers are often inexperienced at navigating the network of journals,” added Powell. “They cannot afford to pay OA fees and they may not realize a publisher would waive them. They may then end up publishing their articles in predatory journals, so their research ends up in places where they are not getting international credibility.”

Publishing models that are incompatible with the financial realities of research in the developing world are not the only challenges researchers face. There can also be bias against them in the editorial and peer-review processes, and this too can drive them to predatory journals. Research4Life is promoting greater inclusion of researchers from the Global South on editorial boards, in peer review, and as conference speakers to address this problem.

Another issue is publisher exclusions. Publishers can choose to exclude certain institutional categories within countries from free or low-cost access if they are creating subscription agreements in those areas. This means researchers may not be able to find the content they are looking for and this, in turn, can deter them from the portal and drive them to predatory platforms.

A FAIRER FUTURE

Research4Life is now at an important turn in its history. Every five years, the partnership conducts a thorough review of its activities and sets its strategy for the next five years. It has just completed an infrastructure review, user review and landscape analysis which it will use as strong evidence base to shape its 2022 strategic plan.

The User Review found that Research4Life makes a significant positive difference to researchers in developing countries — but only when they know about it and are trained to use it. The Infrastructure Review found that usage diminished over the past five years, leading the partnership to investigate how to effectively boost usage and infrastructure to future proof the partnership.

Research4Life’s new strategy will focus on raising awareness, strengthening fundraising, and expanding its products and services from providing access to research to providing access to publishing opportunity. The aim will be to help researchers in the developing world fully participate in the global research community.

The partnership aims to raise awareness through a new ‘Country Connectors’ programme in which users on the ground promote the platform and provide training. The Elsevier Foundation has committed $70,000 a year for three years to support the project, which will also include sourcing local content for the platform. “We will be looking for non-English language content that is practical and focused on solving real-world problems from hygiene to crop protection,” said Powell.

Research4Life will also further align its activities with the SDGs, improve its language coverage and extend its content from journals, e-books and research tools to networks of peers, peer-review systems and funding information with the aim of supporting researchers at every stage of the research journey.

Research4Life also hopes to raise awareness with potential donors. The partnership operates on a budget of around $200,000 a year. Although UN agencies, Cornell and Yale Universities support the infrastructure, it is a mostly voluntary enterprise heavily dependent on the fees paid by Group B countries (those which qualify for low-cost access rather than completely free access). However, this income dropped during COVID-19. To address this, a fund-raising vehicle — Friends of Research4Life — was recently launched with the aim of securing the partnership’s future and funding platform upgrades and training programs. “Elsevier was the first donor,” said Powell. “That was terrific because it set the ball rolling — other publishers came on board after Elsevier announced their three-year commitment.”

Expanding training is another priority. Research4Life already runs webinars and a regular ‘massive open online course’ (MOOC). These classes teach researchers how to navigate the platform and use its advanced research tools but also cover the wider publishing landscape, research techniques, intellectual property and copyright, citation and reference management and editorial and peer-review processes. The classes are an important part of ensuring researchers in the developing world have access to publishing opportunity.

The increasing importance of AI and big data in scientific research threatens to widen the digital divide between developed and developing nations. Research institutions need librarians trained in data science, but this is rare in countries where libraries are under-resourced. Research4Life may extend its training to help close this gap.

Although the new strategy may not reverse the downward trend in usage of the platform given the changes in discovery habits and the arrival of other platforms, the hope is that it will help researchers from the developing world join the global scientific discourse in far greater numbers. Chimwaza is optimistic about the future. “I’m hopeful the balance of production of research is going to tip,” he said. “It will no longer be 90 per cent from the Global North and 10 percent from the Global South. There is growing expertise from these regions that cannot be ignored.”

Research4Life comprises five programs: Access to Research for Health (HINARI), Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture (AGORA), Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE), Access to Research for Development and Innovation (ARDI) and Global Online Access to Legal Information (GOALI). The total value of access to these collections is estimated to be in excess of $10 million per year.

Two categories are eligible for access: Group A countries receive free access and group B countries receive low-cost access ($1,500 per year).

Eligibility is based on five factors: total gross national income (World Bank), gross national income per capita (World Bank), UN Least Developed Countries list, Human Development Index (HDI) and Healthy Life Expectancy (World Health Organisation). Refugee camps recognized by UNRWA, or categorized by UNHCR as planned or managed camps, also receive free access regardless of their geographic location. Fees collected from Group B countries, areas and territories are used to support training, outreach and infrastructure.