Open Access to Science in the Developing World
This article by Peter Suber and Subbiah Arunachalam appeared in World-Information City, October 17, 2005. (World-Information City is the print newspaper distributed to delegates at the November 2005 meeting of the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis.)
An excerpt:
For researchers in developing countries, OA solves two problems at once: making their own research more visible to researchers elsewhere, and making research elsewhere more accessible to them. OA, if adopted widely, can raise the profile of an entire nation’s research output. When Indian research, for example, is published in expensive journals, then all too often it goes unnoticed by other researchers in India. OA journals and archives help to integrate the work of scientists everywhere into the global knowledge base, reduce the isolation of researchers, and improve opportunities for funding and international collaboration.
Although developed countries were the first to encourage OA to publicly-funded research, the model is very appealing in developing countries and likely to spread. One direct way is simply to put an OA condition on publicly-funded research grants. Another is to have universities and research laboratories set up institutional archives and adopt policies encouraging or requiring researchers to deposit their research output even if they also publish it in conventional journals.
Read the full article at: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/wsis2.htm
