Revised guidelines by an international committee for the World Health Organisation (WHO) imply that the WHO should 'encourage' open access (OA) to government funded research findings, it has been reported. This is seen to jeopardise efforts to convince the WHO that it ought to make OA to such findings mandatory. In an earlier version of the committee's guidelines, OA supporters had put in a clause to make OA compulsory.
According to the most recent draft, which will be submitted to the World Health Assembly in 2008, OA should only be 'strongly encouraged'. The WHO Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property, comprising member states of the WHO, suspended discussions at their second session last week in Geneva. The group seeks to prepare a global strategy on essential health-research issues that disproportionately affect developing nations.
OA publishing makes electronic forms of scientific papers freely available on the web. While its advocates say this is the only way to get information to all who need it, critics argue that publishers will lose vital revenue and that compensation measures could hinder release of information by authors in developing countries.
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