Into Africa, NewScientist, February 5, 2004. An interview with James K. Tumwine, founder of African Health Sciences, a peer-reviewed medical journal publishing African science for African readers. It's not free but affordable ($45/year). Why launch an African medical journal? One reason: "I wrote an article about health and education in Zimbabwe....[and] submitted it from a Harare address. The journal rejected it. Later, I went to work in the UK. I waited a couple of months and then resubmitted it to the same journal, from an Oxford address. It was published!" Are online resources useful in Africa? "You might search the MedLine database for abstracts - but when you want to see the full articles they want your credit card number. In Uganda the vast majority of the population don't have credit cards. In the end the full articles had to be faxed to us. Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, recently initiated a programme to make 3000 electronic journals accessible to developing countries. But in Uganda you would have to go to one of the big libraries in Kampala to get them. Just accessing your email through the medical school connection can take up to three hours. So recently I installed a satellite dish outside my office. I'm paying 500,000 Ugandan shillings (£160) a month, which is more than my salary. Then there are technical problems like computers breaking down. For some the internet is just another part of life but for us it is part of a bigger struggle." (Thanks to Darius Cuplinskas.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/05/2004 10:15:00 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.
