Barbara Aronson, Improving Online Access to Medical Information for Low-Income Countries, New England Journal of Medicine, March 4, 2004. An overview of the HINARI program. Excerpt: "Over the past two years, the World Health Organization (WHO) has worked with publishing partners...to improve online access to scientific resources as a way of supporting health professionals, medical researchers, and academics in developing countries. WHO helped to create the Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI), which offers health and medical institutions in 69 of the world's lowest-income countries free online access to a large library of important international journals. This initiative has been expanded to include an additional 44 countries that qualify for access to the journals at a very low price. To date, 47 publishers from all streams of scientific publishing have joined HINARI to offer access to more than 2300 journals and other full-text resources. A total of 1043 institutions in 100 countries (of a total of 113 eligible countries) have registered for the program. Institutions in countries with a per-capita gross national product (GNP) of less than $1,000 receive free access to the journals (see Table). Institutions in countries with a per-capita GNP of $1,000 to $3,000 pay $1,000 per year. These institutions include national universities, professional schools, research institutes, teaching hospitals, and government offices. All staff members and students are entitled to this access."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/04/2004 09:41:00 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.
