Fountain Publishers in Uganda has launched as its first open access book, a powerful and moving indictment of the price in human lives that the global innovation system has extracted in sub-saharan Africa, written by the internationally respected AIDS specialist, Peter Mugyenyi. The book is Genocide by Denial: How profiteering from HIV/AIDS killed millions. This is the first demonstration project in the PALM Africa initiative and the response to the open acess book as well as its impact will be tracked and researched by the PALM team.
Fountain Publishers' motivation in pioneering the first pilot in the PALM programme is to get wider exposure for its books and test the impact of open access on print sales. Fountain publishes a number of leading African scholars as well as Mugyenyi, including Mahmood Mamdani, Ali Mazrui, Archie Mafeje and Sylvia Tamale. James Tumisiime, the publisher, hopes that placing an open access version of these books online will bring more readers to the Fountain publishing list, gaining more inter-African and international exposure and increasing sales of the print version of the books concerned. ...
Print copies of the book are available in the UK from the African Book Collective (ABC) and the book is available from Amazon in the UK and the USA. Now we need to get a system going for POD fulfilment in African countries, something the South African PALM project is addressing.
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.
