As part of its new Open Access policy, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) recently adopted Creative Commons content licences, which allow for free and open distribution of most of its published works.

UNESCO was the first United Nations agency to enact an open access policy, and advocates hope that this will stimulate other global health organisations to make their content open-access.

Indrajit Banerjee, Director of UNESCO's Knowledge Societies Division, explained UNESCO's motives in an interview with open-access advocate Richard Poynder.

"In an era where the World Wide Web plays an increasingly vital role in the intellectual development of societies, information digitization has revolutionised the means by which we share knowledge," says Banerjee. "As the ‘intellectual’ agency of the United Nations, UNESCO has a central and critical role in encouraging the universal sharing of all forms of knowledge in real time to build inclusive Knowledge Societies."

"This may be through the classical form of dissemination, but more importantly by supporting the Open Access movement enabled through the power of the Internet."

Neil Pakenham-Walsh, of Healthcare Information for All, suggests that these policies may also benefit global health agencies such as WHO.

"It could be argued that if all publications were available open access, then any commercial mis-use would be more likely to be exposed and denounced," he offers.

Read the UNESCO open access policy document here and Richard Poynder's full interview here. ecancermedicalscience is an open-access journal operating under a Creative Commons content licence.