A new initiative launched by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), giving researchers and students in developing countries free or low-cost access to scientific literature on agriculture, includes several water-related journals. The AGORA (Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture) initiative provides access to more than 400 key journals in food, nutrition, agriculture and related biological, environmental and social sciences. Among them are: Advances in Water Resources; Journal of Contaminant Hydrology; and Journal of Hydrology (all from Elsevier), and Water Resources Management; and Water, Air and Soil Pollution (both from Kluwer). Conspicuously absent are journals from professional associations like the International Water Association (IWA). Although the IWA has just introduced reduced membership fees for low-income countries, the costs of its journal subscriptions and pay-per-view service remain prohibitive for most developing country institutes. Modeled after the HINARI initiative [1] launched by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2002, AGORA is part of a trend promoting open access to scientific knowledge, not only for developing countries [2], but also worldwide [3, 4].

[1] HINARI ? Health InterNetwork, http://www.healthinternetwork.org/
[2] An example is the Programme for the Enhancement of Research Information (PERI) of the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP), http://www.inasp.info/peri/index.html
[3] For an overview see the Open Directory page on Free Access Theory, http://dmoz.org/Society/Issues/Intellectual_Prop..., see also the
Directory of Open Access Journals, http://www.doaj.org/
[4] SciDev.Net, 3 Nov 2003, http://www.scidev.net/editorials/index.cfm?fusea...

Contact: Pierre Antonios, FAO Media Relations Officer, pierre.antonios@fao.org

Source: FAO, 14 Oct 2003
IWA Member Newsletter, Oct 2003

AGORA - http://www.aginternetwork.org/

Tags: information and communication, water resources management