Other Information Access Programmes

Other organisations are working to ensure that researchers in the developing and emerging countries have access to informaiton. Initiatives include the following:

AGORA : Free or low-cost access to major scientific journals in agriculture and related biological, environmental and social sciences for public academic institutions in developing countries.

DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals): This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals, covering all subjects and languages.

eIFL: 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.

HINARI Phase 1: The HINARI programme, set up by WHO together with major publishers, enables developing countries to gain access to one of the world's largest collections of biomedical and health literature. Over 3750 journal titles are now available to health institutions in 113 countries, benefiting many thousands of health workers and researchers, and in turn, contributing to improved world health.

OARE (Online Access to Research in the Environment): OARE is an international public-private consortium coordinated by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Yale University, and leading science and technology publishers, to enable developing countries to gain free access to one of the world's largest collections of environmental science literature. Over 1000 scientific journal titles are now available in 70 low income countries. Another 36 countries will be added by 2008.

TEEAL: TEEAL is an annually updated, low cost full-text and bibliographic library of over 100 of the world's most important scientific journals in the field of agriculture. TEEAL is offered in two forms: (1) a local area network system-115 journals (LanTEEAL), and (2) a set of compact discs-145 journals (CD TEEAL).