RE: Google in Wall St. Journal

["adam hodgkin" <adam.hodgkin@gmail.com>]

It is good to learn that HINARI, and its parallel programmes 
AGORA and OARE provide a valuable service to researchers in 
countries with low per capita GDP. It is also useful to have Tony 
Mcsean's opinion that it has been an "enormous success".

However he also says that the recent growth in usage has come 
about

"... despite serious lock-out problems with a terminally sick 
authentication system."

HINARI may well be admirable (I am sure that it is), but if a 
supporter can say this, it would seem that we still have a long 
way to go. Serious lock-out problems from an authentication 
system which is no longer economically necessary? That looks to 
me like one more vote for open access to biomedial research.

Adam

On 12/5/06, Tony <T.Mcsean@elsevier.com>"@lists.yale.edu <"Mcsean,> wrote:
> It is not true to say that access to medical information in the
> world's poorest countries is severely limited by IP
> considerations, and in the article Professor Sulston does not say
> this.  Over 100 publishers, covering almost all the world's
> leading medical journals, make our e-journal services available
> through the WHO's HINARI programme. Non-profit organisations in
> the world's 50 poorest countries (as measured by GDP/head)
> receive this content wholly free of charge, and the next 50
> receive it for $1,000/year* - which is 100% ploughed back into
> training and direct support.
>
> The programme has been running for three years and during that
> time it has been enormous success.  In 2006 we are expecting 5m
> downloads from HINARI, an increase of 50% on the year despite
> serious lock-out problems with a terminally sick authentication
> system.  HINARI is Elsevier's fifth largest ScienceDirect
> customer.  At the recent AHILA conference in Kenya it was
> enormously encouraging to see the impact HINARI was having on the
> culture of African medical libraries, their users and the
> universities and hospitals in which they work.  HINARI, and its
> parallel programmes AGORA and OARE, give full-strength access to
> world class information systems - the same service is provided
> to, say, the University of Sierra Leone medical library as to
> Harvard or Cambridge.
>
> And this is not, as is sometimes said, a short-lived experiment.
> The programme's publisher partners have recently agreed to link
> HINARI to the UN's Millennium Goals, which run until 2015.
> Elsevier, like many of our partners is looking at what we can do
> to expand programme content and to support initiatives that will
> drive up usage in the poorest countries and cement evidence-based
> working into their universities, hospitals, government
> departments, NGOs and research institutes.
>
> * There are some exclusions from this list by individual
> publishers but as a broad generalisation this is valid.
>
> Tony McSean
> Director of Library Relations
> Elsevier