Dear HIFA colleagues,
Thank you, Neil and all open access group, for opening this rich conversation on open access and the availability of high-quality evidence.
Building on this discussion, I keep thinking about what happens after evidence becomes available — how it moves (or sometimes fails to move) from publication into the hands and decisions of those who can act on it. Open access may remove the financial barrier to reading research, but many healthcare professionals still face barriers of time, capacity, and context that prevent them from turning evidence into action.
This raises a few questions I would love to explore further:
- How can open access initiatives do more to support translation of evidence into practice, especially in low-resource settings?
- What can be done to make open access content more usable and understandable for frontline health workers who may not have research training?
- Could open access platforms collaborate more with those developing guidelines, job aids, and community health materials, so that synthesized evidence flows more efficiently to end users?
- And perhaps most importantly — how do we ensure that quality and relevance move hand in hand, so that open access truly helps close the gap between evidence and impact?
I’d be very interested to hear colleagues’ perspectives or examples of how open access has either facilitated or struggled to bridge this gap in their contexts.
Warm regards,
Rabia Khaji
Tanzania,
HIFA Open Access Working Group
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Ms. Rabia A. Khaji
Head of MEL and TB Portfolio
SHDEPHA+ Network, Igomelo Street, plot no 114, P.O.BOX 564, Kahama, Shinyanga, Tanzania, Tel: +255 753 554 558, Mobile: +255 684 457 865
Skype ID: RabiaAbeid Twitter:@rabia_abeid Instagram: abeidrabia
Email: rabiabeid@gmail.com /rabia.abeid@shdepha.org Web: https://shdepha.org/
HIFA profile: Rabia Abeid Khaji is the Head of Monitoring and Evaluation and TB Portfolio at SHDEPHA+ in Tanzania. Her professional work is fundamentally centered on overcoming barriers to health information access, particularly for healthcare professionals and vulnerable communities in low-resource settings. Her experience includes: - Gender and Equity Focus: She recently led a comprehensive TB gender assessment for Tanzania and contributed to the national TB Gender Operational Plan, directly engaging with the challenges of equitable access to health information and publishing.[...] She is a member of the HIFA Open Access working group. https://www.hifa.org/support/members/rabia rabiabeid AT gmail.com