Free access to a digital library for developing countries

As of 2006 more than 130 environmental journals from the scientific publisher Springer will be part of the initiative Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE), a digital library for developing countries. Public and non-profit institutions in underdeveloped nations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe will have free access to the peer-reviewed scientific literature of Springer and other leading international publishing houses.

Springer's Environmental Online Library covers a range of publications in topics spanning the uncharted depths of the oceans to the outer reaches of our atmosphere. Springer, one of the founding publishers of OARE, has also made available works on environmental policy – identifying how human behavior can be modified in the future to help minimize problems such as ground water con-tamination and the depletion of the ozone layer.

"Helping to improve access to environment, health and nutrition information in developing countries is a matter of course for us. We already participate enthusiastically in projects such as AGORA and HINARI. I would like to congratulate everyone involved in setting up OARE, which will un-doubtedly be yet another worthwhile effort," said Derk Haank, CEO of Springer Science+Business Media. The Springer environmental collection features journals such as Oecologia, Marine Biology, Climatic Change, Ecosystems, Environmental Geology and Water, Air, & Soil Pollution.

OARE will enable countries to build their own higher education programs in the environmental sciences, educate their own leaders, conduct their own research, publish their own scientific findings and disseminate information to policy makers and the public. Literature in environmental chemistry, economics, law and policy, and other environmental subjects such as botany, conservation biology, ecology and zoology will be available through a portal presented in several world languages, in-cluding Arabic, English, French, Portuguese and Spanish.

The project developing OARE is a partnership between Yale University, the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, Cornell University, the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), and leading scientific publishers around the world.

Source : Springer