Time For Research And Action

In the first of a short series of posts, Anne Radl reflects on the Getting in the Access Loop webinar run last month by the Humanitarian Centre, HIFA2015 and PLoS.

Despite the fact that “Getting in the Access Loop” took place after working hours on a Friday, incredibly, over 50 participants tuned in to the webinar from across Africa, or gathered together at the University of Cambridge, to grapple with the problems of publishing health research in and from Africa.

I use the word incredible here too, because throughout the conversation it became apparent that one of the key barriers to publishing health research in Africa is time.  Even for those awarded research fellowships, prohibitively intensive teaching loads and, occasionally, secondary posts to supplement income, left nearly no time to do primary research let alone get on a slow or unreliable computer to do more research and write up for publication.