Breakthrough on developing countries' access to leading biomedical journals

Breakthrough on developing countries' access to leading biomedical journals

Breakthrough on developing countries' access to leading biomedical journals

The World Health Organisation and the world's biggest medical journal publishers have announced a new initiative which will enable close to 100 developing countries to gain access to vital scientific information that they otherwise could not afford. The British Medical Journal, Open Society Institute of the Soros Foundation Network, Blackwell, Elsevier Science, the Harcourt Worldwide STM Group, Wolters Kluwer International, Health & Science, Springer Verlag and John Wiley worked with WHO to determine a reduced pricing structure for online access to their international biomedical journals.

Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland, director-general of WHO, said:

Many thousands of doctors, researchers and health policy makers, among others, will be able to use the best-available scientific evidence to an unprecedented degree to help them improve the health of their populations.

It is perhaps the biggest step ever taken towards reducing the health information gap between rich and poor countries.

The arrangement agreed to by the six publishers would allow almost 1,000 of the world's leading medical and scientific journals to become available through the Internet to medical schools and research institutions in developing countries without payment or at deeply-reduced rates.

Scheduled to start in January 2002, the initiative is expected to last for at least three years, while being monitored for progress. It will benefit bona fide academic and research institutions, which depend on timely access to biomedical journals. Between now and the end of this year, these institutions will be identified individually and the process put in place, so that they can receive and use access authentication. All parties will learn from this experience. Decisions about how to proceed after the initiative will grow from the precedents it sets, and will be informed by the working relationships which have developed among the partners.

The initiative is an important step in the establishment of the Health InterNetwork, a project introduced by United Nations' Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the UN Millennium Summit last year. Led by WHO, the Health InterNetwork aims to strengthen public health services by providing public health workers, researchers and policy makers access to high-quality, relevant and timely health information through an Internet portal. It further aims to improve communication and networking. Health InterNetwork is expected to offer between 10,000 and 13,000 new health information access sites to developing countries by the end of 2003.

For further information: see the WHO Web site at: http://www.who.int/