Open Access Week 2017: Open in Order To…

For Open Access Week 2017, the Office of Health Economics highlights its research publication archive dating back to 1962

This week is Open Access Week; an annual event celebrating and promoting the public availability of scholarly output. Here on the OHE website, we host a wealth of material published by our staff and collaborators, all freely available to read and download.

The theme for this year’s event is ‘Open in order to…’. Researchers are being encouraged to look beyond open access (OA) as an idea and to think about the real benefits of making their work freely available. At OHE, we make our research OA in order to achieve our charitable goals of advancing knowledge and understanding of key topics in health economics. Making our research available in this way allows us to reach decision-makers, academics, and other stakeholders without the delay of the publication process. We also publish a broad collection of scholarly outputs that might not normally be considered for publication in traditional peer-reviewed journals. This enables us to have a greater impact on the field and to inform better decision-making in the context of health and health care.

Our treasure trove of historical work dates back to October 1962, when the field of health economics was just emerging. Our first paper titled ‘Progress Against Tuberculosis’ is available to download as a PDF, along with subsequent papers in the series that ran until 1998. There’s plenty more in our open access archive, such as our Early Diagnosis Series (1967-1970), and our material for schools explaining ‘The Economics of Health Care’.

The main outlet for our ongoing research output is our Research Paper series. These are academic discussion papers in the traditional sense, which the authors expect to ultimately be published in peer-reviewed journals. Our latest Research Paper describes ‘A New Valuation Method: Directly Eliciting Personal Utility Functions’. For research reports that we don’t think will be subsequently submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, we use our Occasional Papers series.

OHE Briefings describe research that, for a variety of reasons, does not fit the traditional style of an academic discussion paper. For example, we recently published a Briefing on ‘Incentives for New Drugs to Tackle Anti-Microbial Resistance’. We also publish Seminar Briefings to more widely disseminate discussions that take place at OHE-hosted seminars.

As well as our academic research, we conduct a lot of work on behalf of our clients. In this case, the client remains the owner of the work. However, where possible – and with the client’s permission – we publish Consulting Reports to share the work more widely. Our latest Consulting Report is derived from work conducted for Lilly, describing data governance for real-world evidence in South Korea. We also publish a series of Monographs to describe other work conducted by the OHE. In particular, the series reports on our Annual Lectures, such as that delivered by the late Kenneth Arrow.

You can be confident about the quality of the open access research published on our website. Our Editorial Committee consists a panel of eminent researchers from the field, who routinely review manuscripts before release. This has helped many of OHE’s in-house publications become important references for researchers, which serves to reinforce our commitment to making our work open access.