World Bulletin
 | | Online database programs give users in least developed countries access to valuable scientific information. Above, Michigan State professor Michael T. Weber leads a training workshop in Mozambique. Photo courtesy of Information Training and Outreach Centre For Africa. |
Technical Publications Made More Accessible in Poor Countries
By Carolina Hidalgo
Sept. 23 -- To spread access to knowledge and spur innovative activity, the World Intellectual Property Organization, a specialized UN agency, has launched the Access to Research for Development and Innovation program, giving research and academic institutions and industrial property offices in developing countries free or inexpensive access to more than 50 scientific and technical journals.
Indeed, in an increasingly knowledge-based global economy, research that leads to new inventions and ideas can help developing countries generate valuable intellectual property assets, which can attract foreign direct investment and create fair local-market competition.
"Innovation, science and creative activity have been widely recognized as important sources of progress and welfare," said Samar Shamoon, a spokeswoman for the agency.
By providing researchers and scholars in developing countries with recent scientific and technical knowledge, aRDi, as the program is called, aims to encourage new patents, copyrights, trademarks and designs. With the appropriate intellectual property protection, these assets could contribute to wealth and development.
Since July, the program has made journals from prominent science and technology publishers, such as the American Institute of Physics, Oxford University Press and the National Academy of Sciences, electronically available to research institutions, universities and intellectual property offices in 49 least-developed countries at no cost. Intellectual property offices in 58 other countries have been offered a $1,000-a-year subscription to the material, which has a market value of around $400,000.
"This gives organizations within developing countries the opportunity to innovate and to understand how their innovation can be supported or enhanced by having access to research literature," said Jayne Marks, vice president and editorial director of journals for SAGE Publications, an international publisher based in Thousand Oaks, Calif. and one of the 12 publishers on board with the program.
The partner publishers will invest the subscription fees paid by intellectual property offices in developing countries back into the program to help finance outreach and training initiatives to increase awareness and use of the program.
"It is critical that targeted users have the knowledge and skills to access and use the resources effectively," said Gracian Chimwaza, executive director of Information Training and Outreach Centre for Africa, a nongovernmental organization that conducts training on the use of e-resources, including several similar United Nations-supported online journal databases.
The World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization and the UN Environmental Program have all coordinated similar programs in their respective fields, making more than 7,000 scientific journals electronically available in developing countries through their Research4Life initiative. The agencies worked closely with the World Intellectual Property Organization in developing aRDi.
ARDi was conceived in line with the agency’s development agenda — a set of recommendations adopted in 2007 to incorporate development goals into the intellectual property system — and created under the organization's Patentscope umbrella. Patentscope provides a patent search service and publications on how to utilize patent information.
With Research4Life's advice and expertise and positive feedback from scientific, technical and medical publishers, the World Intellectual Property Organization coordinated and launched the program in just a year, with 50 journals available now and more to come.
"This is expensive literature that researchers in developing countries desperately require in their work in order to improve their research and teaching," Chimwaza said.
Carolina Hidalgo is a UNA-USA publications intern and a journalism and sociology student at Stony Brook University.
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