The June 21 issue of HiPakistan features an interview with Dr. Attaur Rahman, Pakistan's Minister of Science and Technology and Chairman of Pakistan's Higher Education Commission. Here's Rahman talking about Pakistan's new national digital library: "What we have done is to launch a nationwide digital library - and this really excites me....And there are 31,600 journals which are available free of charge. Every single school or college or university - any educational institution under any ministry - will get free access. Of these, 11,600 journals are full text. Now each journal can cost thousands and thousands of dollars. And we are talking about 31,600 journals. Over 20,000 journals will be available in the form of abstracts. They will be available for all the disciplines....This means that students sitting at home in Pakistan today can go onto the Internet and download the latest issues of all these journals. It is a huge nationwide library. This is something that no other country, not even the United States, has today....The total cost is $ 350,000 per year. Which is not much considering that there are so many journals...."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/21/2004 09:26:00 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.
