Six Reasons 'Open Access' Matters to the Medical Community

These days there is continuous discussion on ways to improve the efficiency, quality, and cost-effectiveness of healthcare. I would argue that one of the most neglected and important ways to improve our healthcare delivery and innovation is by opening access to research. "Open Access" is the free, immediate, unrestricted availability of high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship over the Internet - combined with the rights to use this information to its fullest possible extent.

So as a future physician why does open access matter to you? Here are 6 good reasons....

1. Education

Ever start searching for resources to write a paper, find the perfect article online, only to click on the link and find your school does not subscribe to that journal? Even then, perhaps you thought about purchasing the article only to find that it would cost $15, more than a month's subscription to most journals. This happened to me yesterday on my internal medicine rotation. I had a patient who had developed gastrointestinal (GI) bleeding but was on medications to thin his blood due to heart problems. This is a risky but very common medical situation. So I began looking up papers on the topic as the management is very controversial. I found the perfect paper which looked at outcomes of stopping vs. continuing blood thinners after a GI bleed, it just been published 1 month ago, and in fact the authors are faculty at my medical school...and yet I was unable to access the article.

The gap in access to up-to-date information diminishes our ability as students to educate ourselves. Furthermore, this gap in access is likely to grow. In the current era of budget cuts at public universities and hospitals expensive journal subscriptions make an attractive target of cost savings. So where does this leave student education? With an even larger gap in access, the majority of students will be unable to fully access information crucial to our education....

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