AFRICA: The availability of academic journals

"The shift to electronic publishing, and the associated reductions in the costs of printing and shipping, has given rise to a number of initiatives for low-income countries. Notably, these include: the United Nations' managed schemes for health, agricultural and environmental journals - Health Inter-Network Access to Research Initiative (HINARI), Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture (AGORA) and Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE); the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications' Program for the Enhancement of Information (PERii); in addition to the work of Electronic Information from Libraries; and a whole host of other smaller programmes. The scale of what is now available online is impressive. PERii alone has negotiated access to more than 23,000 full-text journals in all fields, while HINARI counts over 7,500, AGORA 1,900, and OARE more than 2,990. Additional features are the growing number of open access journals: the Directory of Open Access Journals lists some 6,317....Comparing journal collections at the universities of Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Malawi and Rwanda revealed that there was remarkably good availability of some of the top Thomson Reuters (Institute for Scientific Information)-ranked journals. In fact, 79% of the top 20 journals, across 15 subject areas, were readily available. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in some fields the status quo was stronger than others. In agriculture, biology, materials science, anthropology and politics availability was over 90%, while in mathematics it was just 25%...."