Thanks to [Francisco Javier Bonilla-Escobar] for his message, in which (among other things) he writes: "APCs are just way too over what should it be for most of the Journals that I have experienced. I know that there are Journals out there that have an APC that is reasonable, like Annals of African Surgery, Ciencia e Saude Coletiva, and Revista Medica de Chile (+/-100 USD), but they do not have comparable visibility."
In the OA advisory committee of the Copyright Clearance Center (USA), I have been raising the issue of APCs for Low-and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) for some time now. The general feeling is that "most journals will waive the APC for authors from LMICs". While this is good news, the problem is that this de-facto waiver is often not obvious: you have to request a waiver and then you may get it if you are from an LMIC. This is not good enough. Journals willing to waive APCs for LMICs should say so explicitly: "APCs are zero for authors resident in the following countries....", so the unedifying spectacle of the author having to beg for a waiver from an all-powerful editor is avoided.
Having said that, it is often easier for an author in an LMIC to get a waiver than people working in underfunded areas in other countries. Among the subject areas for which it is next to impossible to receive research funding are health information, knowledge management, health literacy and infodemiology - in other words the main subject areas covered by HIFA. And yet, as recent experience with the pandemic shows, we urgently need to carry out research into "knowledge diseases" causing distortions of health information, literacy and knowledge - health information systems research, not just health systems research...
Chris
Chris Zielinski
chris@chriszielinski.com
Blogs: http://ziggytheblue.wordpress.com and http://ziggytheblue.tumblr.com
Research publications: http://www.researchgate.net
HIFA profile: Chris Zielinski: As a Visiting Fellow in the Centre for Global Health, Chris leads the Partnerships in Health Information (Phi) programme at the University of Winchester. Formerly an NGO, Phi supports knowledge development and brokers healthcare information exchanges of all kinds. Chris has held senior positions in publishing and knowledge management with WHO in Brazzaville, Geneva, Cairo and New Delhi, with FAO in Rome, ILO in Geneva, and UNIDO in Vienna. Chris also spent three years in London as Chief Executive of the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society. He was the founder of the ExtraMED project (Third World biomedical journals on CD-ROM), and managed the Gates Foundation-supported Health Information Resource Centres project. He served on WHO’s Ethical Review Committee, and was an originator of the African Health Observatory. Chris has been a director of the World Association of Medical Editors, UK Copyright Licensing Agency, Educational Recording Agency, and International Association of Audiovisual Writers and Directors. He has served on the boards of several NGOs and ethics groupings (information and computer ethics and bioethics). UK-based, he is also building houses in Zambia. chris AT chriszielinski.com
His publications are at www.ResearchGate.net and https://winchester.academia.edu/ChrisZielinski/ and his blogs are http://ziggytheblue.wordrpress.com and https://www.tumblr.com/blog/ziggytheblue
