The World Bank announced this week a new open data initiative, which provides free and open access to the Bank’s health and development data, including 2,000 social, economic, financial, institutional, and environmental indicators. The World Development Indicators, the Bank’s most popular statistical resource, consist of over 900 indicators for 200 countries alone, including many that go back to 1960. The Bank has also opened up access to the Global Development Finance, Africa Development Indicators, Global Economic Monitor, and indicators from the Doing Business Report.

This step is long overdue. Opening access to the Bank’s data is good news for everyone who is interested in global health and development and wants to get a quick overview of the latest trends or access the data for policy-making, research, and advocacy purposes. Until this week, only a fraction of this data was freely available, making it difficult for interested individuals and organizations to use it. Individuals and organizations in emerging markets and developing countries in particular are often unable to pay subscription fees to access development data – even when discounts are available for developing country residents.

Accessing high quality data should play a critical role in improving accountability and in helping to overcome poverty. It will allow policy makers, researchers, and civil society organizations to track the impact of policies, develop new solutions, and measure the progress of development more accurately. Development data should be transparent and available to everyone around the globe.

The new initiative is truly open access (not just free access) because users are allowed to work with the data to create new applications.  Indeed the Bank is encouraging such creative reuse—it will soon launch an “Apps for Development” competition, to prompt the health and development community to create applications and “mash-ups” using World Bank data.

The World Bank’s open data initiative will be followed by the July 1 launch of the Bank’s new Access to Information Policy, which provides access to an expanded range of reports, documents, and information. This step is welcome, as it will strengthen public ownership and oversight of Bank activities. If implemented as outlined in the policy document, for the first time the Bank will release information on projects under implementation—also a long overdue measure. The Bank will publish important information contained in a series of reports called “Implementation Status and Results Reports,” including information about the status of project implementation and overall ratings on project development objectives and implementation progress. However, staff comments and detailed risk ratings will be withheld. Reports from review missions, known as aide mémoires, which comment on the progress of projects and provide recommendations on further actions, can be released if both the Bank and borrower agree. Given that the aide mémoires entail critical information, their open disclosure should be standard practice. Others have discussed the gaps and limitations of the policy in more detail.

Nonetheless, despite these limitations, if fully implemented, the new policy will bring the World Bank a long way in moving towards the standard of transparency set by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Since its inception, the Global Fund has displayed a high level of transparency and publishes a range of information on grant performance, financing, and Board decisions on its website, though there remains room for improvement. This information is provided by the Global Fund in a systematic way, and it is relatively simple to access and read. It is important that the World Bank follows the Global Fund’s example.

Finally, we note that both the World Bank and the Global Fund were signatories to a recent PLoS Medicine essay called “Meeting the Demand for Results and Accountability: A Call for Action on Health Data from Eight Global Health Agencies.” In that essay, the leaders of eight major global health agencies (the “H8”) made “a public commitment on behalf of each of our organizations to work with other stakeholders to develop a set of specific principles around data sharing by our organizations within two years.” We hope they will live up to this promise.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Gavin Yamey, E2Pi, for helpful comments on this blog.

Competing interest: E2Pi is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  The Global Health Group is directed by Richard Feachem, founding Executive Director of the Global Fund and former Director for Health, Nutrition and Population at the World Bank.

This week – 19th-23rd October 2009 – is the Open Access week around the world – fitting nicely with the 5th birthday of PLoS Medicine. And when I say ‘around the world’ I really mean it. Just check out all the global events happening this week.

The OA Week is co-organized by Open Access Directory, PLoS, SPARC, Students for Free Culture, eIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) and OASIS.

Many countries are participating this year, including some with numerous events all around the country. See, for example, all the events in Germany (there are 67 events in that country alone!), Netherlands, China and Japan.

You can get all the information and follow the events on the Open Access Week blog. There is also a nice round-up on the SPARC site.

As the week unfolds, we will blog more about it here. In the meantime, you can follow the news of the OA week on Facebook or by following PLoS on Twitter.You may also want to sign up to participate in the OASPA webinar (locationless – sign up to participate online).

The PLoS Medicine editors also emphasise the need to look beyond just the biological causes of disease. As the world faces up to the challenges of a changing climate, a turbulent economic system, continued global conflict – and now a possible influenza pandemic – they now wish to reinforce the important place in health research of work that encompasses the social, environmental, and political determinants of health, as well as the biological.

This image also accompanies the April issue and visually sums up the new focus.

All articles published this week in the journal illustrate the journal’s priorities. In the research section the following articles are published:

• Anders Bjorkman and colleagues’ trial of rapid diagnostic testing for malaria diagnosis in Zanzibar
• Majid Ezzati and colleagues’ study of US data on risk factor exposures and disease-specific mortality
• Matthias Egger and colleagues’ comparison of mortality rates between African patients starting HIV treatment and the general population.

In the magazine section a Health in Action article by Yibeltal Assefa and colleagues describes scale-up of antiretroviral treatment across Ethiopia, Bruno Marchal and colleagues argue in a Policy Forum that strategies which strengthen health systems are overly selective, and Daniel Reidpath and colleagues use the fourth Millennium Development Goal (MDG) as an example of the potential to neglect equity in the race to achieve the MDGs.

The PLoS Medicine editors conclude the editorial by saying that we believe our new, evidence-based, approach will not only ensure that open-access publishing reflects the health priorities of the 21st century, but will also reaffirm and revitalize the long tradition of medical journals leading, rather than following, the debate over research priorities.  See the guidelines in the journal for more details.

Finally, a few weeks ago PLoS Medicine moved to Ambra (the publishing system that first debuted with the launch of PLoS ONE and will soon be home to all the PLoS journals). The more computer minded among you might be interested to know that Ambra is built on top of Topaz (the application that stores data in a combination of a semantic database -  which holds all the metadata and a digital repository – which stores images, and xml files etc). This migration further enhances the newly refocused journal since it offers easier commenting and community feedback on the articles to all.