Gavin has an interesting take on it:
I’ve long believed that there are parallels between the global campaign for open access to the biomedical literature and the campaign for access to essential medicines.
For a start, both information and medicines can promote health and save lives. Indeed the late James Grant, former executive director of Unicef, argued that, “the most urgent task before us is to get medical and health knowledge to those most in need of that knowledge. Of the approximately 50 million people who were dying each year in the late 1980s, fully two thirds could have been saved through the application of that knowledge.” Part of the moral case for disseminating the results of health research universally stems from the urgent need to deliver information to health workers in low and middle income settings.
Read the whole thing….
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“the application of that knowledge” needs people trained to apply that knowledge. That is one of the major problems, especially in sub-saharan Africa. When you’re lacking teaching personnel AND your students are dying faster than you can make doctors and nurses out of them, what good is drugs, what good is knowledge, if you can’t get it out into the field where its application is needed? The need to disseminate information to health workers only exists if there are actually health workers who could have such a need.