Médecins Sans Frontières today launches a new website MSF Field Research that will be a tremendous resource for everyone interested in the research that they do as part of their humanitarian work with vulnerable populations. The website aims eventually to be a complete record of all of MSF’s published work; at launch the site has more than 350 articles. Publishers of all the papers have agreed to make them freely available, so the site does not just include open-access papers but many others that normally would require subscriptions to read. As Tony Reid, the editor coordinating the site, says: “We were concerned that health professionals in developing countries would not be able to pay for access to our medical research and would miss information that could be highly relevant to their work”.
Two recent papers are a PLoS Medicine policy forum Research in complex humanitarian emergencies: the Médecins Sans Frontières/Epicentre experience and a research paper on Reasons for unsatisfactory acceptance of antiretroviral treatment in the urban Kibera slum, Kenya, from AIDS Care.
As well as published research and commentary it includes conference abstracts, information on MSF's Ethics Review Board, and in future will have programme descriptions that give lessons learned from the field.
And they are keen to get feedback…