A new initiative has provided scientists in developing countries with free access to online environment journals, with the aim of reducing the information gap between developed and developing countries.
Over 1,000 scientific journals are available to scientists from countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America through the Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE) scheme, launched last month (30 October) by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and US-based Yale University.
Seventy countries whose gross national product (GNP) per capita is below US$1,000 now have free access to the journals. By 2008, access to OARE will extend to 37 other countries whose GNP is between US$1- 3,000. The institutions in those countries will pay US$1,000 per year for the scheme....
However, several environmental scientists believe the effort falls short of free open access as requested by the Berlin Declaration (2003) in which 180 institutions called for open access for all science data.
Donat Agosti, a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, warns that OARE might create an elite network and hamper scientists who wish to research in institutions that are not included in the initiative.
"What will happen if [for example] you want to study some issue related to Kenya? You can't [do so] outside of the elite institutions selected by this project," he told SciDev.Net....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/06/2006 09:31:00 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.
