Creating a National Open Access Policy for Developing Countries

"Progress has also been made in developing nations, and workshop delegates were updated on local developments. In India, for instance, the MedKnow project in Mumbai, has done much to raise the visibility of Indian medical journals in a sustainable way, and without charging authors or readers.

Meanwhile, the Bioline service has recorded impressive increases in requests for full-text papers from the developing country journals it hosts, with a projected one million requests in 2006 for papers that would otherwise be largely unknown and unavailable to local researchers.

This kind of progress highlights the amount of research information that was totally unused pre-OA, due to its inaccessibility.

Successful strategies for filling institutional repositories were also discussed at the workshop, with examples taken not only from the developed regions, but from local research institutes too. One Indian institute, for instance, is 'gently persuading' its scholars to deposit their articles by refusing travel support to those that do not archive their publications!

Further examples were given of OA progress in China and South Africa, as well as from the established SciELO programme in Brazil — all of which confirmed the growth and value of Open Access policies...."