...In 2002, medical staff and researchers in the world’s poorest countries began to have access to the latest cutting-edge research thanks to the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) HINARI (Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative) programme. Through this, around 100 biomedical publishers – from the giants with hundreds of journals to small society publishers with one or two titles – opened up electronic access to their products to those who cannot afford to subscribe to any journals. This resource currently gives access to around 3,750 biomedical journals, which would be equivalent to around £1.5 m per year in subscription costs. This gives trainee doctors in Sierra Leone, for example, access to the same range of resources as their counterparts in Oxford University or Harvard. Such resources have the potential to transform clinical practice, medical training and research in such countries, and 2,500 institutions in the developing world have so far signed up to access these resources.
However, there is a challenge: until recently many institutions in the developing world have been relying on 20 or 30 year old books for their research and teaching and have little or no experience of using the internet. This is where [Lenny Rhine, retired librarian from the University of Florida] comes in. He runs training courses to teach medical librarians and health workers how to use the massive array of resources that have now become available to them. ‘They have gone from nothing to almost too much, so we spend a lot of time teaching search skills,’ he commented....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/13/2007 11:22:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
