Home - Access to Health Information - Developing Countries

Keep up with the News at Global Health Hub

Global Health News at Global Health Hub

The Global Health Hub is a 100% volunteer driven effort to provide an online gateway to news, commentary and resources related to global health and development from around the web. The Hub aggregates content from traditional and non-mainstream sources to help people interested and involved in global health & development to quickly find information. We also compose original news and commentary pieces to provide a dynamic information portal for the global health & development community. Visit http://GlobalHealthHub.org.

Communities of Interest

GHD Online
Members total 8,800 people from 173 countries and over 2,699 organizations: doctors, nurses, midwives, CEOs, program managers, accountants, architects, data experts, software engineers, teachers, students, policy makers and more.
GHDonline’s nine communities are lead by expert moderators who guide the discussions. Members have access to content and services like regularly scheduled virtual panel discussions with leading experts, peer-reviewed discussion briefs, reviews of recent scholarly articles, and leading clinical information resources from GHDonline’s partners. Join the Health IT community to learn about efforts to leverage IT to improve global health. http://www.ghdonline.org/tech/
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Communities are supported by a team of professionals dedicated to helping our members improve health care delivery through global collaboration.

Classes and Workshops: at HMS/HSPH

Countway Library offers classes on "Health Information: Access for Developing Countries" on a regular basis.

The class provides an overview of the HINARI program from WHO. HINARI offers access to biomedical and health information. Clinical and educational institutions in developing and emerging countries are eligible to participate. We will also discuss other open access sources. If you are conducting research, volunteering, or returning to live in a developing or emerging country, you can help others become aware of and use these resources so they can find information and improve health.

These brown bag sessions are held from 12:30- 1:30 and participants are welcome to bring their lunch. You can find a list of the current offerings at https://www.countway.harvard.edu/classes

The slides and handout from this class can be downloaded (below) from this subject guide.

Handouts, Slides, etc. to download

Use the links below to download the slides from the Countway Class on Health Information for Developing Countries. You can also download a WHO handout on HINARI describing which countries are eligible and how to access this program.

Information Access in Developing Countries for HMS Students
Slides from a presentation on 2/27/14. Mobile apps, online books and HINARI are covered.
Health Information Access for Developing Countries Slides
HINARI Information Sheet from WHO

Gateways to Free or Low Cost Health Informations

Directory of Open Access Journals
DOAJ is an online directory that indexes and provides access to quality open access, peer-reviewed journals. Almost 10,000 journal are included.
Essential Health Links
This resource provides more than 750 useful websites for health professionals, medical library communities, publishers, and NGOs in developing and emerging countries
Health Sciences Online
Authoritative, comprehensive, free, and ad-free health sciences knowledge. Search and browse any health sciences topic from over 50,000 courses, references, guidelines, and other learning resources.
Materials are selected from accredited educational sources including universities, governments, and professional societies, by HSO staff.
PubMed Central
PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). In keeping with NLM’s legislative mandate to collect and preserve the biomedical literature, PMC serves as a digital counterpart to NLM’s extensive print journal collection. Launched in February 2000, PMC was developed and is managed by NLM’s National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).
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As an archive, PMC is designed to provide permanent access to all of its content, even as technology evolves and current digital literature formats potentially become obsolete. NLM believes that the best way to ensure the accessibility and viability of digital material over time is through consistent and active use of the archive. For this reason, free access to all of its journal literature is a core principle of PMC.

Please note, however, that free access does not mean that there is no copyright protection. As described on our copyright page publishers and individual authors continue to hold copyright on the material in PMC and users must abide by the terms defined by the copyright holder.
Countway Discovery Medicine
Using multiple EBSCO databases, Countway Discovery Medicine searches across the full text of journal articles rather than just the article title and abstract. The search is also matched against an index of terms (e.g. MeSH). If your keyword matches a term in a paper and also matches, or is a synonym of, a term in the index then that paper will rise in relevance in the results list.

Open Access eBooks
InTech offers more than 770 open access books in the health sciences. Other collections offer science, engineering and social science books.
Institutional Repositories - DASH
Major universities, institutes and other organizations are providing access to materials created by their faculty, students and staff. The link above takes you to Harvard's Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard [DASH]
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Tip: If you find a citation to a paper in a database but access to the full text is not available through your library, search to see if the author's university has a copy of the manuscript in its depository.
Institutional Repository - MIT
Look for Open Access section.
Institutional Repository - Digital Commons
A collection links to College and University repositories. There are separate subsets for medicine and other specialties.