Health and Human Rights Journal Now Open-Access Online Format

Published August 18, 2008, last updated on June 3, 2020 under Education News

Health and Human Rights: An International Journal is now in an open-access online format. The inaugural edition, under the editorship of Paul Farmer, is available at www.hhrjournal.org/index.php/hhr/index

In the introduction, Paul Farmer writes:

“Health and Human Rights is an international journal dedicated to scholarship and praxis that advance health as an issue of fundamental human rights and social justice. It seeks to provide a forum for academics, practitioners, and activists from public health, human rights, and related fields to explore how rights-based approaches to health can be implemented in practice. In so doing, it contributes to fostering a global movement for health and human rights.

HHR’s new electronic format offers resources to expand and accelerate knowledge-sharing on the right to health, making this communication increasingly multi-directional and participatory. Readers who register on the website will be able to post their comments on specific passages of published articles. By registering, readers can also receive further information and contacts from the journal’s editors, so that the conversation can expand. Discussion of relevant issues will deepen through the journal’s blog. The blog incorporates photographs, video, and other multimedia resources to enhance our understanding of the stakes of rights failures and successes, the challenges that practitioners and communities face, and the creative solutions being deployed to advance the right to health on multiple levels, including policy-making, program implementation, advocacy, and community mobilization. The blog will feature information on selected conferences, events, campaigns, and actions relevant to health and human rights.”

“In addition to core articles to appear in the print version of the journal, the HHR website (http://www.hhrjournal.org) showcases a section of “Perspectives”: web-only features, including policy analyses, issue briefs, and advocacy documents, as well as invited opinion pieces and short essays aimed to stimulate debate on health and rights. Over time, the website will also provide links, not only to other online journals and information resources, but to emergent spaces in which communities of practice are organizing to strengthen peer-to-peer learning among practitioners in rights-based health program design and service delivery (for example, the Global Health Delivery Project at Harvard University). Our hope is that the effect ultimately generated by these interactive features will be a qualitative change in how readers relate to and use Health and Human Rights. Increasingly, knowledge-sharing through the journal platform will be “horizontal” and collaborative in character, with readers engaged in defining the questions to be pursued and evaluating the evidence brought forward.”