Programmes which support access to information 1Access to Global online Research in Agriculture (agora)



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INASP/CSC Workshop: Accessing Information in Developing Countries - Handout

International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications

Participant’s Handout

Accessing Information in Developing Countries Workshop

Programmes which support access to information

1.1Access to Global online Research in Agriculture (AGORA)


Web site: http://www.aginternetwork.org/en/

Description from their web site: “The AGORA site provides access to over 400 journals from major scientific publishers in the fields of food, agriculture, environmental science and related social sciences. AGORA is available to students and researchers in qualifying not-for-profit institutions in eligible developing countries.”


1.2African Journals OnLine (AJOL)


Web site: http://www.inasp.info/ajol/index.html

Description: “ AJOL offers the tables of content and abstracts from journals published in Africa on:



  • agricultural sciences and resource management

  • arts, culture, language and literature

  • health

  • science and technology

  • social sciences”

A photocopy document delivery service is available.

1.3BioMed Central (BMC)


Web site: http://www.biomedcentral.com/

Description from their web site: “All the original research articles in journals published by BioMed Central are immediately and permanently available online without charge or any other barriers to access. This commitment is based on the view that open access to research is central to rapid and efficient progress in science and that subscription-based access to research is hindering rather than helping scientific communication. All research articles and most other content in BioMed Central's journals are fully and rapidly peer-reviewed.”


1.4Book Aid International (BAI) Journals Schemes


Web site: http://www.bookaid.org/cms.cgi/site/index.htm

Description: Book Aid International works in partnership with public library services and the local book trade, to promote a reading culture and to advocate the importance of books and information for development. It supports its partners through the sharing of learning resources, and through training and capacity building to maximise their effectiveness.

Book Aid International believes access to relevant information is necessary for development in all spheres. It gives priority for support to organisations working in education, health, human rights, gender issues, environmental protection, and agriculture. It assists partners to target disadvantaged groups and to develop services that will meet their needs. Book Aid International works in 30 developing countries. The greatest concentration of effort is on 16 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, which are among the poorest in the world. For more information also see INASP directory.

1.5British Medical Journals (BMJ) Publishing Group


Web site: http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/

Description from their web site: “Free to users from the World Bank's list of 120 low and lower middle income countries. The BMJ aims to publish rigorous, accessible and entertaining material that will help doctors and medical students in their daily practice, lifelong learning and career development. In addition, it seeks to be at the forefront of the international debate on health. The web site was launched in May 1995 and contains the full text of all articles published in the weekly BMJ since January 1994. In addition, it contains material that is unique to the website.”


1.6CTA Agricultural Package + CTA Library Project


Web site: http://www.agricta.org

Description: CTA was established in 1983 under the Lomé Convention, a cooperation agreement between the ACP (African, Caribbean and Pacific) group of states and the European Union (EU) member states. CTA's tasks are to develop and provide services that improve access to information for agricultural and rural development, and to strengthen the capacity of ACP countries to produce, acquire, exchange and utilise information in this area.

CTA's programmes are organised around three principal activities: 


  • providing an increasing range and quantity of information products and services and enhancing awareness of relevant information sources; 

  • supporting the integrated use of appropriate communication channels and intensifying contacts and information exchange (particularly intra-ACP); and 

  • developing ACP capacity to generate and manage agricultural information and to formulate ICM strategies, including those relevant to science and technology. These activities take account of methodological developments in cross-cutting issues and the findings from impact assessments and evaluations of ongoing programmes.

For more information also see the INASP directory.

1.7e-BioSci


Web site: http://www.e-biosci.org/

Description from their web site: “Driven both by the new discipline of genomics and increasing use of multi-dimensional imaging technologies, the amount of digital information in the life sciences is growing exponentially. Biologists are faced with the challenge of organizing and integrating this torrent of biological data, held in a plethora of genomic sequence, sequence-related and other types of databases and scattered across many thousands of articles in the published literature.

As part of the response to this challenge, EMBO, the European Molecular Biology Organization, took the lead to create the E-BioSci network, a next generation scientific information platform that will interlink genomic and other factual data with the life sciences research literature.

The platform will offer scientists and other researchers new forms of navigation through an increasingly intricate and often confusing information landscape. Work on E-BioSci is currently carried out with financial support from the European Commission (Contract no. QLRI-CT-2001-30266). Together with partners drawn from different research institutions across Europe, EMBO aims to develop the platform into a freely available service for the research community.”


1.8Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL)


Web site: http://www.eifl.net

Description from their web site: “eIFL.net is an independent foundation that strives to lead, negotiate, support and advocate for the wide availability of electronic resources by library users in transition and developing countries. Its main focus is on negotiating affordable subscriptions on a multi-country consortial basis, while supporting the enhancement of emerging national library consortia in member countries.”


1.9Electronic Journals Library


Web site: http://rzblx1.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/

Description from their website: ”The Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek EZB (Electronic Journals Library) offers an effective use of both scientific and academic journals publishing full text articles in the internet.

This service has been developed at the Universitätsbibliothek Regensburg (University Library of Regensburg) in cooperation with the Universitätsbibliothek der Technischen Universität München (University Library of the Technical University of Munich).

All the time, the EZB is being further enlarged .

Meanwhile, 251 libraries and research institutions make use of this service in their daily work.

They collect the titles cooperatively and update the bibliographic data jointly in a central database. For each participating institution, we generate a range of electronic journals adapted to the respective library's requirements. Each member can administer for itself the locally licensed journals and integrate individual user instructions by means of a decentralized specific license administration. Online journals on subscription can therefore be offered within the same system as free e-journals.”


1.10ExtraMed


Web site: http://www.iwsp.org/ExtraMED.htm

Description: ExtraMED originated from a project of the World Health Organisation. It consists of the publication in CD-ROM format of copies of health and biomedical journals, containing all the text and illustrations of the original journal articles. The text is in page images – printouts look like photocopies of the original articles, catalogued and searchable by keyword.

Taking its name from the fact that it comprises journals that are `extra' to MEDLINE, ExtraMED focuses on journals that are largely excluded from the international indexes. The ExtraMED Consortium of Journals now comprises over 290 biomedical journals throughout the world, selected through WHO's various Index Medicus projects. ExtraMED is designed to serve the purposes of promoting the literature of developing countries, while subsidising its production and development through subscription revenue. At the same time it provides a powerful new research and diagnostic tool.

The journals in ExtraMED are mostly from developing countries. They include many topics that MEDLINE journals do not cover adequately. Printed copies of the articles can be made from the disk. The main advantage of ExtraMED is that it gives the most important medical journals of the non-MEDLINE world in one source. The CD-ROM is published every month and contains the equivalent of 8000 pages. Also see INASP directory.


1.11FreeMedicalJournals.com


Web site: http://www.freemedicaljournals.com/

Description from their website: “The Free Medical Journals Site is dedicated to the promotion of free access to medical journals over the Internet. “


1.12Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI)


Web site: http://www.healthinternetwork.org/

Description from their web site: “The Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) is a new initiative to provide free or nearly free access to the major journals in biomedical and related social sciences, to public institutions in developing countries. Starting in January 2002 with over 2000 journals from the world's leading biomedical publishers, HINARI is part of the Health InterNetwork, which was introduced by the United Nations' Secretary General Kofi Annan at the UN Millennium Summit in the year 2000.



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, via the Internet. It further aims to improve communication and networking.”

1.13ICTP/TWAS journal donation programme


Web site: http://www.ictp.trieste.it/~donation

Description: The ICTP/TWAS Donation Programme has distributed annually around 20,000 books, proceedings and journals among a few hundred institutions in 100 developing countries. Journals are despatched directly from the donor to the recipient, whereas books and proceedings are sent to the Centre and then on to the recipients. The Centre and the Academy cover the shipping costs of material sent to Trieste and to developing countries, if donors are unable to do so. 

The Donation Programme specially acknowledges participation from: American Institute of Physics, American Physical Society, Elsevier Science Publishers, IEEE - Signal Processing Society, IUPAP, Lindsay Ross, The Royal Society of London, The Royal Swedish Academy, Springer, Wiley, World Scientific Publishing Company. 

1.14ICTP e-journals delivery service (eJDS)


Web site: http://www.ejds.org/

Description: Aware of the new technologies available and the advent of electronic journals, the Abdus Salam ICTP/TWAS Donation Programme, in collaboration with the ICTP Scientific Computer Section and ICTP Library, has developed a prototype information retrieval system called `eJournals Delivery Service'. It distributes individual scientific articles via e-mail to world scientists who do not have access to sufficient bandwidth to download material from the internet in a timely manner and/or cannot afford the connection. Famous publishers such as Elsevier, American Physical Society, Institute of Physics Publishing, World Scientific give free access to their journals through the eJDS. Providing scientists with current literature will support their ongoing research. The eJournals Delivery Service allows scientists to search and/or download articles using e-mail only and to follow hyperlinks as if they were surfing the web via a live internet connection. 


1.15Institute for African Alternatives (IFAA)


Web site: http://www.ifaanet.org/

Description: The Institute for African Alternatives (IFAA) was established in 1986 with the purpose of encouraging research and discussion on contemporary problems in Africa. The IFAA is a network institute with a secretariat in London and centres in various African countries.

The IFAA publishes reports, conference proceedings, lectures and occasional papers arising from its own activities. IFAA also has a co-publishing programme of textbooks by African scholars in conjunction with Zed books.

IFAA publishes a bi-monthly bibliography of African books and sends books and journals free to many African universities and scholars.


1.16International Book Project (IBP)


Web site: http://www.intlbookproject.org

Description: Founded in 1966, the International Book Project (IBP), Inc. boasts a long and successful history of supplying books worldwide. It is a non-profit organisation that distributes books to virtually any location in the developing world. It sends basic subject textbooks of the pre-kindergarten through the graduate school level, as well as library books, nursing and medical books, and popular and technical journals. Requests are received from schools, universities, study groups, hospitals, clinics, churches, organisations, and libraries. The friendships, created across the globe, have been the centerpiece of IBP's mission to broaden Americans' understanding of their neighbours, promote education and literacy, and strengthen world unity. IBP's unique tracking systems links American contributors with foreign book recipients, establishing relationships that often endure for years.

By providing needed, quality books to the peoples of the developing world, the International Book Project seeks to:


  • promote education and literacy in developing countries and in areas of need in the United States;

  • broaden Americans' understanding of their neighbours;

  • foster global friendships and strengthen world unity.

In 2003 IBP distributed 108,968 books to nearly 100 developing countries and to areas in need in the U.S. IBP shipped container shipments to Thailand, Guatemala and India. In addition, IBP shipped almost 700 smaller shipments to needy organisations in the most remote areas of the developing world. IBP, and its partners and donors across the world, helped make a total contribution of educational materials valued at over $3.0 million in 2003. 

1.17Journal Donation Project (includes Nigeria in Africa)


Web site: http:///www.newschool.edu/centers/jdp.htm

Description: The Journal Donation Project (JDP), based at the New School University, Graduate Faculty was launched in 1990 by Professor Arien Mack, to assist in rebuilding major research and teaching libraries throughout countries of the former Soviet Union, through the provision of current subscriptions to English -language scholarly, professional and current events journals. One of the principle aims of the Project has been to create the best possible scholarly resources at recipient libraries; another has been to identify libraries dedicated to change and the opening of archives. Thus, all of the libraries within the network - national, university, academy of science and public libraries - have been selected as sites where users would have the greatest possible access to the journals provided. The journals serve to connect scholars, students, and professionals to a global community of research and debate, and thereby contribute to the crucial task of reconnecting them with the mainstream of modern intellectual life.

The goal of the project was and is to provide major research and teaching libraries with current key journals published in the West until they are able to procure materials with their own resources. Until 1995, the Project was based entirely upon the donation of subscriptions by publishers and editors. In 1996, however, the Project introduced a reduced-cost subscription program, in which participating publishers now offer discounts that average over 50%. The number of publishers participating in these ways is continuously increasing. 

Today, the JDP represents a major international library assistance programme, with over 2,000 different English-language journals in the social sciences, humanities, law, public policy, business, technology, agriculture and medicine. Additionally, over 90% of the print titles provided by the Project are accompanied by complimentary electronic subscriptions. Through an agreement with EBSCO/eIFL the Project is able to provide three large online databases - Academic Search Premier, Business Source Premier and MEDLINE - to its network libraries.

Currently, the Project's library network is comprised of over 300 libraries throughout 30 countries, in the former Soviet Union, Eastern and Central Europe and more recently Ghana, Nigeria and Iran. Through JDP, these libraries receive approximately 6,000 subscriptions annually.

1.18Medbioworld


Web site: http://www.sciencekomm.at/

Description from their web site: “With 25,000 links, Medbioworld is the largest medical reference site, including all medical journals and medical associations, and similar resources in the biological sciences. Links include 6,000 medical journals in 80 subspecialties, and the home pages of 4,000 medical associations. Other research tools include medical glossaries, disease databases, clinical trials and guidelines, and medical journals offering full-text articles.”


1.19NUFFIC Netherlands Periodicals Project (NPP), delayed subscription service


Web site: http://www.nuffic.nl/

Description: NUFFIC was founded by Dutch universities in 1952 in order to stimulate and encourage international cooperation in higher education. Under its long-term programme of support to higher education and research in developing countries NUFFIC, since 1983, has been operating the Netherlands Periodicals Project (NPP).

The NPP desk is familiar with the needs for scientific literature (primarily scientific journals) of a number of university libraries in the South. The project is aimed at the well-directed acquisition of these periodicals from libraries of Dutch institutions for education and research and at matching the material offered with the requests of a selected group of institutions in developing countries. In this sense the project is entirely request-led.

The project also runs a `delayed subscription' service with which it aims to be able to guarantee the donation of specific journals to fixed recipients.

The majority of the NPP shipments go to destinations in Africa but relations are also maintained with universities and research institutions in Asia and Latin America. For institutions to become recipients in the project they have to be a counterpart in one of the long-term programmes for international cooperation in higher education funded by the Netherlands Ministry for Development Cooperation. In reality the project works with a more or less fixed core group of around thirty institutions. The most important counterparts are situated in Bolivia, Costa Rica, Eritrea, Burkina Faso, India, Kenya, Mozambique, Philippines, Tanzania, Vietnam and Zambia.

Despatch is by sea-mail and distribution is handled in-country by Dutch embassies where possible. The recipients themselves are responsible for distribution of the goods. Recipients are asked to return an evaluation form that is sent to them around the date of arrival of the shipment. This is done both as a check of the contents, for the benefit of the project administration, and as acknowledgement of the safe arrival of the goods.


1.20Programme for the Enhancement of Research Information (PERI)


Web site: http://www.inasp.info/peri/index.html

Description: During 1999/2000 the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications was approached by research partners and librarians in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the New Independent States to assist them in the design and implementation of a programme of complementary activities to support information production, access and dissemination utilising ICTs. Following two brainstorming workshops and a large number of country-wide discussions, the Programme for the Enhancement of Research Information (PERI) was born. 

The immediate objectives of the programme are to: 


  • facilitate the acquisition of international information and knowledge 

  • improve access to research through the promotion of national and regional journals. 

  • provide awareness or training in the use, evaluation and management of electronic information and communication technologies (ICTs); 

  • enhance skills in the preparation, production and management of journals. 

The objectives are being met by interlinked and complementary activities including: 

Delivering information: INASP has been working with individual publishers, 'packagers' of information and consolidating subscription agents in facilitating the acquisition of full text online journals, current awareness databases and document delivery. The goal is for resources available through PERI to be affordable so that their acquisition is sustainable in the long term. INASP has been successful in negotiating differentially-priced country-wide access licenses at 90-98% discount.

PERI currently provides in excess of 17, 000 full text journals and many of the world's leading bibliographic and reference databases including those from Blackwells, CABI, EBSCO, Emerald, Gale, Institute of Physics Publishing (IoPP), Oxford University Press, OVID (Silver Platter), Springer, the Royal Society and Update Software. Negotiations with further publishers are ongoing.

In addition, attention is drawn to all those resources which are available without cost to researchers in developing countries: Document delivery is available through the British Library Document Supply Centre (BLDSC). 


1.21PubMed Central (PMC)


Web site: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/

Description from their web site: “PubMed Central is a digital archive of life sciences journal literature, developed and managed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). With PubMed Central, NLM is taking the lead in preserving and maintaining unrestricted access to the electronic literature, just as it has done for decades with the printed biomedical literature. PubMed Central aims to fill the role of a world class library in the digital age. It is not a journal publisher. NLM believes that giving all users free and unrestricted access to the material in PubMed Central is the best way to ensure the durability and utility of the archive as technology changes over time.”


1.22Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO)


Web site: http://www.scielo.br/

Description from their web site: “The Scientific Electronic Library Online - SciELO is an electronic library covering a selected collection of Brazilian scientific journals.

The library is an integral part of a project being developed by FAPESP - Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo, in partnership with BIREME - the Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information. Since 2002, the Project is also supported by CNPq - Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico.

The Project envisages the development of a common methodology for the preparation, storage, dissemination and evaluation of scientific literature in electronic format.”


1.23Supply of Academic Publications (SAP) project


Web site: http://www.fiuc.org/iaup/esap/Memorandum.pdf

Description from their web site Electronic Supply of Academic Publications (ESAP) to and from universities in developing regions - is an initiative of the International Association of University Presidents (IAUP), in cooperation with the International Federation of Catholic Universities (IFCU); supported by V.L.I.R.: the Flemish Interuniversity Council (Belgium).

The eSAP - project is a collaboration project between universities in the North and the South. It has two clear goals: 


  • To promote the access to the international scientific journals by means of Internet for universities in developing regions. 

  • To supply academics in developing regions with the possibility to electronically publish their articles on the Internet.

One of the aims of eSAP is to provide the participating African universities with a possibility to electronically publish their proper articles and reports on the Internet and thus to make their academic work known and available to the world

The eSAP - project focuses on East - Africa. At the moment 10 universities from the following 5 countries participate in the project: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.


1.24The Essential Agriculture Library (TEEAL)


Web site: http://teeal.cornell.edu/

Description: TEEAL (The Essential Electronic Agricultural Library) is a full-text collection of core journals in the field of agricultural and related sciences. The CD-ROM is available at low cost to 111 developing countries around the world. Journals in the TEEAL system cover many subjects, including: rural development, sustainable agriculture, natural resources, environment, food processing and veterinary medicine.

The Rockefeller Foundation, Cornell University's Albert R Mann Library, and major scientific journal publishers have co-operated to create TEEAL for the purpose of revolutionising access to information in the developing world. Over 55 universities and research institutions in more than thirty developing nations have implemented TEEAL.

Currently, eight years of over 140 journals subscriptions (dating from 1993-2000) are available comprising 1.5 million pages of full text and graphics scanned on to 337 CD-ROMs. Updates for 1997,1998, 1999 and 2000 are at present available. Future updates will be available one year after the original year of publication.


1.25The Sabre Foundation


Web site: http://www.sabre.org/

Description: Sabre Foundation, Inc., founded in 1969, works to build free institutions and to examine the ideals that sustain them. Its largest project makes millions of dollars' worth of donated books available to needy individuals in developing and transitional societies worldwide through non-governmental partner organisations, libraries, universities, schools, research organisations and other similar institutions.

Sabre's Book Donation Program strives to increase access to information resources in developing and transitional societies through large-scale distribution of in-kind donations of new books and other educational materials. Working closely with overseas non-profit partner organisations in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa and select other regions of the world, Sabre has to date shipped new books, journals, CD-ROMS and early learning materials to more than 60 countries. 
18 million books were shipped in 2003.

Through its Library and Information Technology Services, Sabre helps organisations in these regions take advantage of rapidly evolving Internet and related information technologies. Sabre also sponsors domestic and international symposia and philosophical publications which explore the nature and accountability of free institutions.


Copyright INASP – see: http://www.inasp.info/training/training-materials-copyright.html for more details.




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