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Some of the images and stories we have already received.

Dr. José Ignacio Valenzuela

Chief of Special Projects in e-Health, Division of Education, Fundación Santa Fe de Bogotá, Colombia.

Right when the national initiatives on sexual education in Colombia had been proclaimed to have failed to achieve its objectives we, at the Division of Education of Fundación Santa Fe de Bogotá, were evaluating our open access free teleconsultation service in Spanish, which we baptized as Doctor Chat.

A project which initiated as an "experimental" idea to assess the potential impact of web-based medical consultation and the behaviors towards it in a country with suboptimal internet connectivity soon became a program on its own, with a medical and technical team dedicated to delivering gratuitous health information to a population in-need.

Surprisingly and despite the access barriers to information technologies among the country and the Region, by the first 8 months after the service's go-live we had received more than 500 teleconsultations from all over the Colombian territory and other Latin American countries, requesting information on barely every health specialty, but mainly, on sexual and reproductive health matters. The experience has been so great we are now planning on expanding the service to allow the formulation of consultations through cellular phones, which penetration surpasses 70% of the country’s population, being very superior to that of internet.

I believe we have developed a simple and cheap tool that could importantly contribute to health promotion and prevention to vulnerable communities, thanks to the open code collaborations. Now we have to be able to assure its sustainability and for that we need funding. We call for international partners to support these initiatives, as their potentials are practically unlimited, especially for the developing world.

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Pascalina Chanda

Operational Research Officer, National Malaria Control Centre

Open access publishing has given us an opportunity to a world of information regardless of where one is. Previously (before open access was possible) it was almost impossible to know the latest in malaria research unless you read an abstract or an institution got some hard copies which always arrived a month or more after publication.

However, with BioMed Central, one is able to have a wide range of information on research activities. This helps in providing the much-needed information on topical issues and one can learn form diverse methods, geographical settings and be able to participate in the global debate on health issues and also provide quality policy information. It also enables us form the developing world to publish our research findings and share the information with other researchers globally.

With the coming of mobile Internet facilities, we are able to use mobile phones and connect to the information source no matter how far one has travelled from offices. I think the open access facility has made information dissemination possible and offers an opportunity to developing country researchers to share information and also to access information from the global community.

These pictures were taken during the field visits for our setting up of sites for demographic surveillance system in Mpongwe District (rural Zambia).

View articles published by Pascalina Chanda in BioMed Central’s open access journals.

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Prof. John Fontenele Araujo

Laboratório de Neurobiologia e Ritmos Biológicos, Departamento de Fisiologia, UFRN.

After returning from Barcelona, Spain, I spoke in my department about the news in chronobiology of the discovery of melanopsin, and that the circadian rhythms of some mice that were completely blind synchronized in a light-dark cycle. One of my students told me that in our primate colony there were two blind marmosets (Callithrix jacchus). We studied these two animals and showed that in spite of the marmosets being completely blind they showed a robust circadian rhythm in a 24h light-dark cycle. This was a good opportunity for my students to publish a paper and present their work to an international congress. Now, some of them enrolled in the graduate program.

View articles published by Prof. John Fontenele Arauj.

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Dr. Samar Sayedyahossein

Student and Culture Administration, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences.

I am a newly qualified medical doctor, a 26 year old female and I live in Isfahan Province of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In our university we established a group named "Educational Group". We would go to the suburbs of our province, which are in poverty and may have little access to educational facilities. We would also take a trip to other provinces and would manage free educational programs for the high school students of those areas. We have held more than 10 courses for these students during the past three years. We held a Creativity workshop, Hypnotherapy workshop, Heart and Kidney dissection workshop and other courses for students. The best medical students from the University teach these courses. For mathematics we have colleagues from the technical universities of Isfahan. One of the schools in the suburb areas of Isfahan has one set of computers. Though it is not up to date, we have used it to establish online education for the students. And with easily accessible Internet services we would be able to manage continuous education for high school students all around Iran.

Besides this, our colleagues have started a new and innovative group called the"Scientific Café". We invite our university teachers and talk about the scientific development of Iran. This is very nice as ordinary people in the Café can hear and also take part in the discussions. Open access to the electronic world would allow us to improve our knowledge and quality of our sessions, but for this we need new facilities.

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Dr. Obiageli E. Nnodu

Consultant Pathologist for the College of Health Sciences at the University of Abuja.

As a researcher I have received many international fellowships during the course of my career, but I credit open access publishing with helping me get our research into the public domain. During my time as Chief Consultant Pathologist at the National Orthopaedic Hospital in Nigeria, we were able to raise the awareness of bone tumours.

Many physicians in developing countries and even institutions cannot afford the yearly subscriptions to scientific journals published abroad. But open access publishing helps to bridge the gap between the well-established institutions, which can afford to undertake cutting edge research, and the trenches of developing country health care institutions, where late presentations of cases are the norm and physicians have limited resources to care for them.

Access to up to date scientific literature free of charge helps one to know what is going on as well as the chance to share one's experience. I see this definitely as the way to go. I am now working on a project to bring cytology training closer to home to interested physicians in the West African subregion.

View articles published by Dr. Obiageli E. Nnodu in BioMed Central’s open access journals.

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Athula Sumathipala

Honarary founding Director of the Institute for Research and Development (Sri Lanka) / Honarary Research Associate postion at the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College, London.

We, at the Institute for Research and Development (IRD), Sri Lanka, believe that the concept of open access pioneered and popularised by BioMed Central is of great importance to academics working in the developing world. The portal of 'Open Access and developing world’ not only enables open access but takes a step further by providing internet technologies to the developing world.

I am a Sri Lankan academic who had to leave the country in 1992 due to political reasons. However, as soon as I could return in 1997, along with other like-minded colleagues I initiated a programme to develop an overarching research culture in Sri Lanka. This started out small but has now become a fully-fledged Institute, the IRD (www.ird.lk). Through our research we have gained credibility and were commissioned by the Ministry of Health Sri Lanka to carry out an extensive island wide mental health survey. Our work had also had impact on policy in disaster management and ethics.

During the initial stage with an Indian colleague we conducted a survey to find the country of origin of papers published in six leading psychiatric journals. It was a difficult task to find all printed journals either in India or Sri Lanka. We found that only 6% of publications originated from the regions of the world that account for over 90% of global population. [Patel and Sumathipala, 2001; 178:406-409]. We suspected that this gross under representation of the developing world in publications may have been confined due to the search of only psychiatry journals and we therefore decided to repeat it in five high impact medical journals. Findings were identical with the contribution of developing countries being only 6.5% (Sumathipala, Siribaddana, Patel 2004). This marginal representation of research from the population that bears 90% of the disease burden is a significant ethical issue. However, this piece of research could not find a place in two of the journals included in the survey. One rejected it outright and the other journal showed initial interest but later decided not to proceed, due to reasons we believe were not entirely academic. However, BMC Medical Ethics decided to publish this work. We were also delighted that the peer review process, which was extremely helpful, was not anonymous. English is not our first language but this did not adversely affect our chance of publication.

View articles published by Athula Sumathipala in BioMed Central’s open access journals.

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Dr. Stefano Casalotti

UCL Joint Physiology/ILO Lecturer Birkbeck, University of London

I have worked in Thailand between 1992 and 1997 as a lecturer and researcher at the Neuro-behavioural Biology Centre, Mahidol University Salaya,Thailand.

On my return to the UK I joined UCL and maintained a collaborative project with Mahidol University. Thailand is a so-called newly industrialized country and whilst the lab at Mahidol University was very modern, the University did not subscribe to many journals, so I often had to use the old-fashioned method of requesting a reprint from the authors.

The speed at which you can access information is of course of critical importance. It is not a matter of technology but of money. A subscription to a journal can cost as much (or more) than employing a researcher locally and it is very difficult for universities to justify subscribing to journals rather than employing people. Therefore when we came to publish the results from our UCL/Mahidol collaboration I chose BioMed Central so that I knew that anybody could access the information easily and at no cost. Unless you have worked in universities that simply cannot afford to subscribe to many journals you cannot appreciate the importance of 'open access'. I would like to encourage all scientists to use this form of publication because it is the only fair way of sharing knowledge between countries that have different economies.

View articles published by Dr. Stefano Casalotti in BioMed Central’s open access journals.

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Rob Christley

BVSc DipVCS MVCS DipECVPH PhD MRCVS Senior Lecturer Epidemiology Research Group Faculty of Veterinary Science University of Liverpool

Our field station is in Sambel Kunda, a small village in the Central River District, The Gambia. When these photos were taken in 2005 there was no permanent electricity supply and intermittent mobile phone reception. Now we have access to the Internet (courtesy of the local school), a consistent supply of solar generated electricity and good telephone access (mobile and landline). Until recently, access to scientific literature was impossible for the team in the Gambia; now it's a mouse click away! Open access publication not only makes sense; for our work based in developing countries it is an obligation.

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Staff member of the Gambia Horse and Donkey Trust demonstrating the use of a manual centrifuge.

View articles published by Rob Christley in BioMed Central’s open access journals.

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Feng Tian

PhD Candidate Tsinghua University

I think your Open Access and the Developing World portal is of great importance to the academic world. As a researcher, I always meet the problem of being unable to access articles that could be very helpful to my research because my University fails to order the e-version of the online journal. As such I have to turn to the authors, or to my friends in other colleges who might provide an e-copy. This wastes a lot of valuable time and sometimes has no result.

I appreciate BioMed Central's efforts to make academic resources openly accessible. I'm now studying China’s incidence of liver cancer and collaborate with people in Beijing, Shanghai, and my supervisor in Chicago. Thanks to today’s technology we can exchange our ideas and discuss the problems freely through the Internet almost everywhere there is a wireless network. And because of open access I now have the freedom to follow the latest development of study in my area and to read materials in my area wherever I am.

View articles published by Feng Tian in BioMed Central’s open access journals.

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Katja Vouk

Institute of Biochemistry Faculty of Medicine

Nobody can imagine working in research without Internet access anymore. In China IT is booming in all areas, however subscriptions to scientific journals are expensive. Open access journals are a blessing for researchers in developing countries that often have access only to a limited number of journals.

These pictures are from the Chinese National Center for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention, Dept. of Virology & mmunology where a dedicated team of young scientists work on HIV/AIDS vaccine development. I had the honor to be part of this team in 2002/03.

View articles published by Katja Vouk in BioMed Central’s open access journals.

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Philip Hill

Clinical Epidemiologist, Bacterial Diseases Programme MRC Laboratories Banjul, The Gambia

“I remember my boss in The Gambia coming back from an African WHO meeting - he recently published a paper from The Gambia of great relevance and very high impact, but subscription-only, journal and was shocked that none of the African health leaders knew of it. Indeed none of them could access the article. This to me showed the craziness of the upside down world we live in. Working in a developing country I feel I need to be one of those to take a lead in this respect, and publish much of my work in open-access journals.”

View articles published by Philip Hill in BioMed Central’s open access journals.

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Prof Andrew M. Prentice

MRC International Nutrition Group, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, London

Professor Prentice is also the scientific director of the MRC Nutrition Programme based around the rural village of Keneba in The Gambia, West Africa. He sent us some images of him and his research team using internet technology in The Gambia – including setting up a RBGAN satellite link at his remote camp.

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Dr. B.M. Afolabi

World Health Organization, Lagos, Nigeria

“Please keep up the good work. We are all behind you here in Africa.”

Dr Afolabi sent us some pictures taken in the field during an antimalaria drug efficacy test (AMDET) in 2002 and 2004.

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