Friday, March 03, 2006

Journal access to Africa

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) has announced that it will give Africa free access to its journal archives. A total of 1.5 million pages and 250,000 articles will be available electronically to African scientists.

Science Key to Africa's Future: To drive home the point, Professor Calestous Juma, co-ordinator of the UN's Millennium Project Task Force on Science, Technology and Innovation says "If all the aid from Live Aid was spent on agricultural colleges rather than relief, Ethiopia would not be in difficulties today".

Open Access Movement has been around for years fighting the idea of mandatory paid subscriptions to access journal articles as it impedes the academic dissemination of ideas freely among the scientific community through out the world.

some outlets for free public access to journals are PLOS, arXiv, and there are many more.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I would agree, the bit about Agricultural Colleges. One of the reasons India can feed itself is thanks to the Green Revolution. One of the few good things governments of yester years did.

I wonder why Africa hasn't followed the model. Actually I'm begining to wonder why India has not applied green revolution in its more backward states.

bharath said...

I think Africa are still in the process of shaping out their identity as independent Nation states. Though India received freedom only 50 years ago, for a long time before that we had had the idea of an Indian Nation. From what little I know, Africa seems to have been mostly made of warring tribal factions, with weak independent movements.

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