This page is to generate discussion and solicit help regarding EquityEdit, a fundraising mechanism for Nyaya Health.  

EquityEdit (www.equityedit.org) is a team of scientists and scholars from universities in the United States and Europe who work as editors for the for-profit biomedical editing company ProEdit Japan. The compensation they earn then goes to fund small, innovative, pro-poor global health organizations.  Our current beneficiary is Nyaya Health (www.nyayahealth.org).  We meet the high demand for technical editing services for medical research articles, and simultaneously raise funds to make use of this research through public health programs in poor countries.

Our organization is expanding.  The amount of funds generated for Nyaya Health since we started a year ago have totaled over $10,000, and we have increased the number of editors from three at the beginning of last year to over forty.  To further improve our model, we are looking for individuals with backgrounds in marketing, social enterprise, biomedicine, technical editing, and public health.  Please contact editor(AT)equityedit(DOT)org if interested in joining our team, and specifying whether you are interested in any of the below opportunities.  

Alternatively, if you are interested in becoming a paid editor, please apply at http://www.equityedit.org/apply.html.  Note that you must have significant first-author publication experience to be considered as an editor.  We are also looking for scientists who are conversant in Japanese who can act as translators. Please apply through the same applicant portal.

EquityEdit IT volunteer

EquityEdit is a collaboration between the non-profit charity Nyaya Health and the for-profit corporation ProEdit Japan that aims to improve biomedical writing while funding global health equity. We have expanded considerably over the last few months, and are now interested in setting up a more efficient a file transfer system for our clients and editors that would be somewhat similar to the online submission systems used by most academic journals.  EquityEdit is looking for volunteers who can help to streamline the application and manuscript editing process for our freelance editors. Programming experience and general interest in file sharing applications is desired. The volunteer would have to work approximately 10-30 hours starting as soon as possible. The ideal candidate would have both have technical skills and an interest healthcare in South Asia.

EquityEdit Finance Volunteer 

We are looking for a volunteer to explore additional financing mechanisms for EquityEdit.  One option that we are interested in pursuing is a matching donations program in which we solicit benefactors who are willing to provide matching funds to those raised by our editors.  Although there is some evidence suggesting that challenge and matching donations programs increases donation behavior (http://aida.econ.yale.edu/karlan/papers/MatchingGrant.pdf), EquityEdit is a unique situation that will require some adaptation and innovation to make compatible with such programs.  An overview of our model is here: http://www.equityedit.org/Library/financialmodel.htm

EquityEdit Marketing volunteer 

We are looking for a volunteer to explore marketing avenues for EquityEdit.   Presently, the main bottleneck in the EquityEdit model is in marketing to potential clients.  Recruiting high-quality editors has not been a problem, but providing them with enough orders has been more challenging.  We are only operating at approximately 10% of what our editors could achieve.  We did receive a google grants award ($5000 of internet advertising per month), but this has generated little interest.  Our main clients are Japanese biomedical scientists.  One strategy we would like to pursue English-language news outlets and blogs with press releases about our model, as well as writing pieces in scientific journals (for example PLoS Medicine's Health in Action section).  Subsequent to this, we would pursue Japanese news outlets.  The main storyline that we would pursue in any of these is: http://www.equityedit.org/strategy.html