HINARI and open access- together in a PubMed search
The Access to Research Initiative (HINARI), introduced by the United Nations’ Secretary General Kofi Annan at the UN Millennium Summit in the year 2000, continues to provide free or very low cost online access to major biomedical literature to not-for-profit institutions in developing countries. Initially six international publishing companies responded to Annan’s call to improve health in the developing world. HINARI’s sister programs, AGORA (agriculture) and OARE (environment) , combine to offer a truly broad scope of scientific literature to the developing world.
We are approaching the 10-year anniversary for this successful program of publisher-subsidized free or low-cost access. The participating publishers, according to the HINARI web site, are committed to working with HINARI in its current format at least until 2015.
PLOS and BiomedCentral, the most widely recognized open access publishers, are also soon reaching their 10-year anniversary. The US National Institute of Health’s PubmedCentral (PMC)has been in existence for about the same period. The NIH Public Access Policy became law in early 2008, with permanent status established in March 2009.
A customized filtered search of PubMed, saved as a user default in MyNCBI, can produce search result which compares HINARI, free, and complete search results. The following graphic shows a PubMed search for the topic malaria, showing the relative proportions of all citations retrieved, free full text within that retrieval, HINARI results, and PMC citations retrieved.
Of course, the total years covered by PubMed indexing make this comparison slightly misleading. Limit the same search on malaria to the last three years, and you see a more dramatic comparison of HINARI, PMC, and open access:
HINARI provides access, in this case, to more than 50% of the total literature, and free full text is also providing more than 40% of the total. Here’s a video on using MyNCBI created by Melissa Rethlefsen at the Mayo Clinic Libraries:
Very good especially for Third World countries and students.