In an effort to help reduce great disparities in scientific capital between developed and developing nations, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Yale University, and leading science and technology publishers launched today a new collaborative initiative to make global scientific research in the environmental sciences available online to tens of thousands of environmental scientists, researchers, and policy makers in the developing world for free or at nominal cost.
Through Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE), more than 200 prestigious publishers, societies and associations will offer one of the world’s largest collections of scholarly, peer-reviewed environmental science journals to over 1200 public and non-profit environmental institutions in more than 100 developing nations of Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe. Each and every institution enrolled in OARE will receive resources with an annual retail subscription value in the many hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Over 1000 scholarly scientific and technical journal titles...will be provided through a portal presented in English, Spanish and French. OARE will also provide important Abstract and Index Research Databases....
OARE aims to contribute to the development of expert professional and academic communities and an informed public, encourage scientific creativity and productivity, and facilitate the development of progressive science-based national policies. It will help enable countries to build their own higher education programs in the environmental sciences, educate their own leaders, conduct their own research, publish their own scientific findings, and disseminate information to policy makers and the public....
A complete listing of collaborating institutions is available at [the OARE web site].
Eligible institutions include universities and colleges, research institutes, ministries of the environment and other government agencies, libraries, and national NGOs. Access for institutions in the 70 poorest countries will be free. Access for institutions in 38 lower middle income countries will be at a nominal charge, which will be reinvested to support continued training and outreach activities in eligible countries....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/31/2006 10:41:00 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.
