Hinari Access to Research initiative has announced that its collaborative efforts to provide free and low cost access to health research in developing countries have made a significant impact on advancing scientific discoveries in these regions.
Designed by the WHO and global biomedical publishers, the programme seeks to provide health sector institutions in developing countries with timely access to high quality research at low or no cost. An impact analysis, conducted by STM publisher Elsevier, has shown that researchers in the countries benefiting from Hinari have begun to publish their findings in international peer-reviewed journals at a rate that is well in excess of the increase seen in the rest of the world.
Over the five-year period from 2002-2006, 105 Hinari countries saw a 63 percent growth in the number of authors publishing in peer-reviewed journals, compared to 38 percent in 102 non-Hinari countries. This is seen to indicate that Hinari has had a significant impact on the participant countries' ability to engage with the global scientific community. Since its inception in 2002, the programme has been adopted by academics, researchers and policy makers throughout the developing world to expand their ability to access and use research information.
Hinari has two sister programmes - Agora (Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture), sponsored by the FAO; and OARE (Online Access to Research in the Environment), sponsored by the UNEP and Yale University. All three initiatives have the official commitment from the participating organisations at least until 2015, which marks the target for reaching the UN's Millennium Development Goals. Measuring growth in scientific output will help evaluate the continuing success of these efforts to support the growth of science in the developing countries.
