Healthcare professionals battling Ebola outbreak in Africa can now access Elsevier medical content

Healthcare professionals in African countries can access Elsevier medical content, online and by mobile devices, through ClinicalKey and NIH's Emergency Access Initiative

To support healthcare professionals in West Africa battling the Ebola outbreak, Elsevier will provide free access to its primary online clinical information and reference tool, ClinicalKey.

The African countries that are part of this free ClinicalKey access program include the four in West Africa currently affected - Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Guinea - plus other African countries where the outbreak has the potential to spread, including Cameroon, Central African Republic, Ghana, Angola, Togo, United Republic of Tanzania, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Burundi, Equatorial Guinea, Madagascar and Malawi. All IPs originating from these countries will be granted free access for the next two months.

"Our thoughts and prayers during this crisis are for the people of West Africa, especially the healthcare workers there, from all over the world, who are working hard to contain this outbreak," said Jay Katzen, President, Elsevier Clinical Solutions. "As a provider of health, medical and patient care information, Elsevier is opening up the largest single reference site for clinical information, ClinicalKey, to frontline aid and medical workers to support their efforts during this challenging time."

ClinicalKey provides evidence-based clinical answers drawn from the single largest body of clinical content available, including Medline, 600+ journals, 1,100+ books, drug information, guidelines, and patient education. Its Smart Search enables ClinicalKey to understand clinical terms and thus discover the most relevant medical content and find related content often missed by other search engines. ClinicalKey is also now optimized for any mobile device.

In addition, Elsevier is one of many publishers contributing to the Emergency Access Initiative (EAI), a program of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in partnership with the U.S. National Library of Medicine, the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, and the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers. The NIH activated the program in August in response to the Ebola outbreak.

The EAI provides free access to full-text articles from over 650 biomedical serial titles and over 4,000 reference books and online databases to healthcare professionals and libraries affected by disasters. The EAI serves as a temporary collection replacement and/or supplement for libraries that need to continue to serve medical staff and affiliated users in disaster areas. It is also intended for medical personnel responding to the specified disaster. For further details visit http://eai.nlm.nih.gov.

Access to Elsevier's ClinicalKey is IP-validated through West and Central Africa for hospitals, institutional libraries and other healthcare entities supporting those battling the Ebola outbreak. Healthcare and disaster aid workers in West Africa will be able to access ClinicalKey by going to www.clinicalkey.com. Access will be valid for the next two months.

In addition to these efforts, one of Elsevier's top medical journals, The Lancet, has set up an Ebola Resource Center where healthcare professionals can read the latest updates, research, reviews, editorials, correspondence and commentary on the outbreak.