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Médecins Sans Frontières research is now freely available online

24 May 2008

Joao Souza

Source: Organization Médecins Sans Frontières (see original article)

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) – Doctors without Borders – has announced the launch of a new website (www.fieldresearch.msf.org) where the organization makes freely available published research that is based on its medical work in the field. The aim is to make the findings of this research readily accessible, especially to health workers in developing countries.

MSF was originally created by a small group of French doctors in the aftermath of the secession of Biafra from Nigeria in 1971. It is currently composed of about 3,000 doctors, nurses, midwives and logisticians recruited to run specific projects, alongside volunteers. It is governed by an international board of directors located in Geneva, Switzerland. MSF received the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize for its humanitarian work providing medical training and health care wherever needed – regardless of race, religion, politics or sex – and also because of its continuous efforts to raise awareness of the plight of the poor communities with which it works.

Throughout its history, MSF has been recognized for establishing innovative approaches for tackling a broad range of diseases – which have often influenced clinical practice. Some well-known examples are its pioneering work in treating populations infected with HIV using antiretroviral medications, and malaria-affected people with artemisinin-containing drugs.

The new website is a result of an extensive work by MSF, which has archived all its peer-reviewed research and commentary articles. Initially, there will be over 350 articles in this open repository, on subjects that include HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, leishmaniasis in addition to many other diseases. All content on the new website will be available under an open-access policy – similar to that adopted by journals such as PLoS Medicine.

However, most of the articles presently on MSF Field Research have already been published in restricted-access journals – such as The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet and Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene – which usually require subscriptions or make individual articles available only on payment of a fee. But all of these journals have responded positively to the organization’s requests that they make the MSF articles available free of charge.

In a press statement, Dr Tony Reid, medical editor at the Belgian office of MSF in Brussels, said: ‘We were concerned that health professionals in developing countries would not be able to pay for access to our medical research and would miss information that could be highly relevant to their work’.

‘The vast majority of our medical activities, and by extension our research initiatives, take place in poorer countries’, continued Dr Reid, adding: ‘We therefore applaud the willingness of medical publishers to allow us to archive the articles free of charge for the global medical community.’