STM publisher Hindawi Publishing Corporation, US, has announced the launch of its 'Country Web Pages,' which gives its website visitors an overview of the research output of a particular country published in Hindawi's open access journals. Along with the list of articles originating from the country, these pages will also list the scholars who authored these articles, scholars who are currently on the Editorial Boards of Hindawi journals, and those who reviewed one or more articles for any Hindawi journals in the past couple of years.
The Country Web Page for a particular country can be accessed using a URL of the form 'http://www.hindawi.com/countries/code/,' where 'code' is the ISO Standard 3166 two-letter code of that particular country.
In August 2008, Hindawi launched its Open Access Institutional Membership program. The programme enables authors from member institutes to publish their work in Hindawi's more than 125 open access journals without having to administer and pay any Article Processing Charges from their individual research budgets. The company's next project will be the creation of Research Funder Web Pages, which it hopes to release in the near future.
While collaborative research efforts continue to grow, another prominent trend is that some leading publishers are beginning to develop country specific websites. For instance, Nature Publishing Group (NPG) formed NPG Nature Asia-Pacific in January 2006, in response to the rapid growth in output of research from the region. Almost a year later, the company launched its first country-specific portal - Nature China (www.nature.com/nchina) - in February 2007. This was followed by the launch of Nature India (www.nature.com/natureindia), a new website highlighting best scientific research from researchers based in the country, in February 2008. In addition, STM publisher Elsevier recently launched the German language version of its professional clinical reference tool, MD Consult, in a move to provide interactive clinical reference and clinical decision support (CDS) tools to new markets in Europe.
