We are delighted to share news of the launch of PERii —the second five-year phase of INASP’s Programme for the Enhancement of Research Information. PERii focuses on the needs of people in developing and emerging countries, working with partners to support global research communication by helping to strengthen existing knowledge, skills and capacity.
Taking advantage of the possibilities offered by ICTs, PERii focuses on a number of core programme areas [including] access to international scholarly literature....
In [participating] Network countries INASP commits the time and funds to enable access to resources such as training materials, publications, and a directory of free and open access resources via the country-specific web pages....
From Lucy Browse, PERii: Information Delivery:
Through PERii, INASP works with over 50 publishers and aggregators to negotiate access agreements for their resources on behalf of partner and network countries. It is important that this access is sustainable in the long term, so the models for access are a combination of heavily discounted and free subscriptions. Each agreement is negotiated in a way that is context-specific to the socio-economic and infrastructure situation within each country. Because equity is at the heart of INASP’s activities, along with the hope of encouraging growth and strengthening of consortia within countries, the information delivery team negotiate for countrywide access for all eligible institutions whenever possible.
Our activities are demand-led by Country Co-ordination (CC) teams and the resources available comprise online journals, books, databases and grey literature across all disciplines. Currently, consortia are able to select from online resources comprising over 25,000 journals (including 18,000+ full text) and 30 book collections containing over 11,000 books. Because the developments in open-access materials also provide an important source of information, INASP maintains a Directory of Resources that contains links to programmes complementary to PERii, open access resources available to all researchers and resources that are freely available to researchers in qualifying developing and emerging countries. At the current time the directory includes multi-disciplinary, subject-specific resources and links to institutional repositories....
Each year we are seeing growth in the number of institutions registering for access, and at the end of 2007 this rose to 989....
In 2007 we saw over two million downloads from the partner countries, and these present only a fragment of the picture as they represent downloads from institutions with fixed IP addresses rather than from those accessing using usernames and passwords (an important route of access for researchers in the field, open universities, etc)....
From Peter Burnett, PERii: Library Development:
The library development component of PERii works with librarians to enable them to develop and enhance their skills to exploit and provide access to the resources of their institutions, to train their users appropriately, and develop digital services to meet the growing expectations of scholars and researchers....
From Julie Walker, Publishing Support at INASP:
Following on from the success of African Journals Online (AJOL), which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, INASP has been working in conjunction with the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) at Simon Fraser University in Canada to establish four new Journals Online (JOL) services in Asia: Vietnam Journals Online (VJOL), Nepal Journals Online (NepJOL), Bangladesh Journals Online (BanglaJOL) and Philippine Journals Online (PhilJOL)....
In order to strengthen and consolidate the JOLs set up in Asia, we have launched AsiaJOL, a harvester developed by PKP which allows searching across all the JOL content. AsiaJOL will also include Indonesia Journals Online (IJO), which was set up independently and includes content from 14 journals....
Support has been given to the the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) for the production of a Practical Guide to implementing Open Access Archives in Developing Countries. Although open access archives are growing in number across the developing world, there are often no instructions on how to set up and maintain them or how to address key implementation issues in countries with poor ICT infrastructure. This guide will seek to address that gap and to promote the sustainability of open access archives....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/29/2009 03:09:00 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.
