The Higher Education Commission (HEC) has provided students and faculty members of universities across the country with online access to over 40,000 text books and research journals.
Under Digital Library Programme of HEC, an open-access online portal has been established through which all journals published in Pakistan have been made available for worldwide electronic access.
The portal allows international exposure of research conducted within Pakistan, and assists in the international peer-review process of indigenous publications.
In 2006, the HEC had commissioned a case study of its Digital Library by International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) that covered the content, training, marketing, finance, monitoring and evaluation and impact of the digital library....
Over 220 leading international publishers have been identified for the access, including Oxford University Press, Taylor and Francis, Blackwell Synergy, BMJ Publishing Group, Cambridge University Press, Emerald, John Wiley and Sins, McGraw Hill Book Companies, MIT Press, Springer Publishing Company, Stanford University Press, Sybex Inc, and United Nations University Press....
Pakistan has become one of the first few countries in the world in which the entire student community is being given free access to a large knowledge source....
Comment. It looks like the government is providing subsidized priced access to the non-Pakistani journals, rather than open access. But I can't tell about the Pakistani journals. Also see the May 2007 announcement of the OA portal for Pakistani journals, and the National Digital Library itself.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/16/2007 10:30:00 PM.
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.
