Middle Eastern research has a new portal to the world - The National

"Here in the UAE, home to the world's tallest building, playground of the world's leading architects and birthplace of countless ambitious and globally resonant cultural initiatives, it can sometimes feel as though one is living at the centre of the modern world. In fact, according to one vision of our times, when it comes to scientific, medical and technical research, the UAE and almost the entire Middle East is living in the dark ages....The man charged with changing all that is Arend Küster, the German managing director of QScience.com, a joint initiative of the Qatar Foundation and the UK's Bloomsbury Publishing that is designed to put Middle Eastern research firmly on the map....Increasingly, however, some of the world's major research funding bodies - from the Welcome Trust and the Max Planck Society to the UK's National Health Service and the US government's National Science Foundation - have embraced open-access publishing as part of their mandates, and this is the model that Küster and his Bloomsbury team have adopted...."Not going with open access would be suicidal," says Küster. "Library budgets are squeezed and they won't buy journals without a track record, which we don't have at the moment. On the other hand, we have seen from research that citations go up exponentially if articles are available online." And open access, he says, puts "a very typical Doha spin" on academic publishing. "In 1983, when you went to the Corniche you had the Sheraton and nothing else; now you have this amazing skyline. We are taking a similar approach to scientific, technical and medical publishing. We don't have a legacy, but that means we don't have to do things a certain way solely because that's how we have done it for the past 50 or 100 years. We can start from scratch and can choose the delivery medium we think is best." ..."