I have my own nomination, and before you yawn, hear me out for a moment. This is not a story that should be on the cover of NEWSWEEK or trumpeted from the rooftops. It’s technical, highly unvisual (and thus not fit for much TV coverage) and unrelated to our lives in the short run.
But that’s the key-the short run. Because in the long run-say, 25 years from now-the decision this week by six major publishers of medical journals to give researchers in poor countries free or discounted online access to more than 1,000 publications is profound. This means inexpensive medical libraries all over the world. Imagine this were the 19th century and the United States decided to ship all of the railroads it made and track it laid to the developing world for free. That’s what the information infrastructure is in the 21st century. With the help of the World Health Organization, the wealthy nations just laid a big bridge over the digital divide.
Right now, medical journals can often cost $1,500 a year or more. A journal called Social Science and Medicine goes for $3,000 annually; the journal Brain Research costs $15,000. Doctors in the countries most affected by, for instance, river blindness have the least access to journals like Trends in Parasitology. “It sounds very dry, but if you’re trying to do something about these problems, you can’t get ahold of the critical information,” says Barbara Aronson, a librarian at the WHO who originated the idea when she noticed that Third World doctors were photocopying like crazy at international conferences. “There are free sources of medical information on the Internet, and Medline gives you abstracts, but the real sources of information cost lots of money.” Even when articles are sent for free, postal delivery in many under-developed countries is unreliable (magazines are frequently stolen). The Internet is often a better bet.
So the WHO asked the publishers to provide the journals online for free for 60 countries where the per capita GDP is $1,000 or less. Another 30 countries will get discounts. Software will allow tiered access and monitor illicit reselling or redistribution of the information. (The British Medical Journal and The Lancet have been available for free in poor countries for years.) “If you waited for these countries to grow rich enough to buy these journals on their own, you’d be waiting a long time,” Aronson says.
The recent discounting of AIDS drugs obviously has a bigger impact in the short run. But in the long run, the free journals may be more important. What the Third World most lacks is infrastructure. This begins to build it. In the old formulation, instead of giving the poor fish, it gives them a fishing rod to catch their own over time. That sounds like big news to me.
