Innocent or deliberate omission? E-Health Partnerships in Low Income Nations
I was reading a recent interesting article, A Toolkit For E Health Partnerships In Low-Income Nations, in a non-open access journal, Health Affairs, expecting to find some mention of open access biomedical publishing playing some sort of major or minor role in this toolkit. I also knew that the publisher of this journal was originally on board and publicly on the roster of the DC Principle publishers that banded together to resist open access and the NIH public access policies. Frankly, it still bothered me that a journal with editorial focus on public health and sponsored by an organization with a name like Project Hope was trying to resist the tide of open knowledge, a obvious source of hope for so many that cannot afford material.
The good news: Health Affairs (the journal) is on the HINARI roster of Publisher Partners (though the Publisher, Project Hope, is not… go figure)
More good news: Project Hope, the publisher, is not represented as a signatory on the latest DC Principle objection to the Federal Research Public Access Act
Now to the innocent or deliberate omission (I guess you will have to have a subscription to verify this). The toolkit article was presenting a persuasive discussion that organized information is a critical part of delivering high-quality, efficient health care and promoting both electronic health records and evidence based practice in global health settings. Towards the end of the article following descriptions of recent partnerships to improve the funding conditions for health partnerships, the authors state their intention to “identify six key steps that should be undertaken, and four obstacles and challenges that must be overcome, for these partnerships to accomplish the most good.” What follows are five (5) steps…not six. Briefly,
- Dissemination of details of successful partnerships
- The funding of new multidisciplinary relationships among academic, public, and private partners.
- Support for mentoring relationships between successful and new partnerships.
- Development of training programs to support the effective use of e-health tools in developing countries.
- Ensuring local commitment.
Now is the absence of the sixth step merely an editorial oversight? Well, you can fill in your own step 6. , but here is my own hypothesis. Suppose the sixth step read something like:
“Support the use of institutional repositories to provide timely access to partners in health informatics research, as well as further disseminating public health scholarship to serve the interests of emerging health informatics programs in economically challenged countries.”
Perhaps some editor that either recites the DC Principles every morning or considers green open access (pre- or post-prints in institutional repositories) to be intolerable just decided to strike it….then realized changing the introduction to five would draw the attention of an author.
I will send this post to the authors to confirm my suspicion and invite them to comment on my idea for the missing sixth key step. Or they will dash my dream 
