Poor countries to be given free access to medical journals

Citation

(2001), "Poor countries to be given free access to medical journals", Interlending & Document Supply, Vol. 29 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ilds.2001.12229dab.017

Poor countries to be given free access to medical journals

Poor countries to be given free access to medical journals

The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the world's six 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 arrangement agreed to by the six publishers, who are Blackwell, Elsevier Science, the Harcourt Worldwide STM Group, Wolters Kluwer International Health & Science, Springer Verlag and John Wiley, will 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 for free or at deeply-reduced rates. Until now, biomedical journal subscriptions, both electronic and print, have been priced uniformly for medical schools, research centres and similar institutions irrespective of geographical location.

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. These institutions are being identified individually and the process put in place so that they can receive and use access authentication. All parties – the publishers and the participating institutions – 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.

Source: WHO press release