OA is a matter of special concern in developing countries, which have less money to fund or publish research and less to buy the research published elsewhere. Most libraries in sub-Saharan Africa have not subscribed to any journal for years. The Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, has the best-funded research library in India, but its annual library budget is just Rs 100 million (about $2.2 million)....There are many successful OA initiatives in the developing world. These include Bioline International, which hosts electronic OA versions of 40 developing country journals; SciELO, which hosts more than 80 journals published in Latin American countries and Spain; and African Journals Online (AJOL), which provides free online access to titles and abstracts of more than 60 African journals and full text on request. The Electronic Publishing Trust for Development (EPT), established in 1996, promotes open access to the world's scholarly literature and the electronic publication of bioscience journals from countries experiencing difficulties with traditional publication. India is home to many OA journals that charge no author-side fees. All 10 journals of the Indian Academy of Sciences and all four journals of the Indian National Science Academy are OA journals....The Indian Medlars Centre of the National Informatics Centre is bringing out OA versions of 33 biomedical journals and has an OA bibliographic database, providing titles and abstracts of articles from 50 Indian biomedical journals. Medknow Publications, a company based in Mumbai, has helped 30 medical journals make the transition from print to electronic open access and most of them are doing much better now than before. OA archiving is even more promising than OA journals. It is less expensive, allows faster turnaround, and is compatible with publishing in conventional journals.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/18/2005 03:08:00 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.
