Free Articles on Health and Environments

For those not at universities, finding research on the connections between health and places can be a bit tricky. However, a growing number of online resources are meeting these needs. The entry below lists just a few of  these:

Several research funders provide free access to journals:

• Active Living Research, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has sponsored quite a few special issues with free downloadable articles. Many of them are are listed at: http://www.activelivingresearch.org/resourcesearch/journalspecialissues.

• Healthy Eating Research, another RWJF-funded group, also has free special issues: http://www.healthyeatingresearch.org/publications-mainmenu-111/special-journal-issues-mainmenu-118. In addition they have sponsored a number of proceedings and presentations: http://www.healthyeatingresearch.org/publications-mainmenu-111/proceedings-and-presentations-mainmenu-145.

Some government agencies who fund and use research have online databases, including free downloads:

• Pub Med.gov is produced my ythe U.S. National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed. With over 20 million citations, some linke to free downloads. I find their advanced search engine to be most helpful: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/advanced.

• The U.S. Transportation Research Board's Transportation Research Information Service (TRIS) is a terrific database of transportation resources, some related to health and some of these available for free: http://tris.trb.org/.

• The U. S. HUD USER research portal is similar, with a bias toward housing: http://www2.huduser.org/portal/bibliodb/pdrbibdb.html. This wasn’t working when I uploaded the link but I imagine it will be soon.

There are a number of free online journals. Many are newer.

• A terrific resource for free journals is Highwire, a division of the Stanford University Libraries that aims to make research more accessible: http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl. For example back issues of Environment and Urbanization are free after 3 years: http://eau.sagepub.com/ and the American Journal of Public Health after 2 years: http://ajph.aphapublications.org/.

• Examples of journals with where authors pay fees, include the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph) and the International Journal of Health Geographics (http://www.ij-healthgeographics.com/). I have reviewed for the latter (for free) but have mixed feelings about this approach of charging to publish, although it is common in the sciences.

• In planning the online journals with free submission and publication are in related areas such as transport and include the Journal of Transport and Land Use (https://www.jtlu.org/index.php/jtlu).

Other groups provide research summaries. Design for Health’s own research summaries provide accessible summaries of research on various health topics, as of 2007 and 2008: http://www.designforhealth.net/resources/researchsummaries.html. There are others that I will highlight in upcoming blogs.