Research blocks.

Byline: Rana J. Asghar and Abid Rehman

OPEN access refers to the unrestricted right to access, re-use and share scholarly research for academic development purposes. The major reason behind this phenomenon is the facilitation of research around the globe, so that communities living in underdeveloped and developing countries benefit from scholarly research findings for their own contextual use. In developed countries, researchers mainly rely on institutional subscriptions for such literature. But in developing countries such as Pakistan, researchers do not have access to much of the literature due to heavy subscription charges. This lack of access to quality journals is a major reason behind the research development disparity between developed and underdeveloped countries.

According to a recent study, researchers from eight countries of the developed world mainly from the US, the UK, Germany and Japan contribute 85 per cent of the most cited science research produced, while 163 counties (mostly from the developing world) only contribute 2.5pc of the cited output. And out of 3,000 indexed journals in Medline, only 2pc are contributed by developing countries. In a nutshell, the authors of the study find, nearly 80pc of the global population is contributing only 13pc of the 140,000 titles listed in Ulrich's Directory of Scientific Serials.

Researchers from countries such as PakisAtan and India rely mainly on personal relations to access quality research literature. Sources like personal emails to students and teachers working in Western research institutes are used to overcome the access barriers. There is a huge difference between citations from open access in the research output among these two regions: researchers from developing countries mostly cite from the open access articles, while researchers from developed countries predominately have citations from subscribed journals. Consequently, the reference lists of the research articles from developed countries are on average 6pc longer as compared to the research publications from developing countries. This not only impacts the quality of research produced, but also the implications of research on the rest of the society.

The HEC should provide dedicated funding for access to paid journals.

A wide range of research institutes, donor agencies and funding bodies currently have more than 700 open access policies globally. Research data in this particular field shows that almost 25pc of...