Poor countries will get medical journal access

By Anita Manning, USA TODAY

Researchers and medical students in nearly 100 developing countries will have free or low-cost access to electronic versions of about 1,000 pricey medical journals through an arrangement announced today in London.

The six largest publishers of medical journals have agreed to provide access through the Internet at prices far below subscription rates, some of which cost $1,500 a year or more.

"Access to information is the cornerstone for local communities to develop their own infrastructure for health delivery systems," says Jim Palmer, a consultant with the World Health Organization, which is working with the publishers on the initiative.

Many scientists in poor countries rely on outdated medical texts or brief summaries, called abstracts, of current scientific papers that appear on the Internet, says WHO's Barbara Aronson. "In Africa, a lot of people are making medical decisions based on the abstracts," she says. By giving these physicians and researchers complete, up-to-the-minute scientific information, "we're going from a starvation diet to the most nutritious diet."

All the journals' online material will be available, she says, not just current issues. Price will be scaled according to each country's finan cial status.

The initiative, set to begin in January, is a collaboration of WHO, the British Medical Journal, the Open Society Institute of the Soros foundation network and journal publishers Blackwell, Elsevier Science, the Harcourt Worldwide STM Group, Wolters Kluwer International Health & Science, Springer Verlag and John Wiley.