HINARI Access to Research Initiative has announced that a special panel discussion, 'Bridging the Digital Divide by 2015: partnering to provide the developing world with critical research' was held on July 19th at the 3rd EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF 2008) in Barcelona, Spain. The ESOF 2008 brought together 4000 scientists, researchers and decision makers to discuss the latest trends in science.
The 'Digital Divide' panel included representatives from the WHO, SciDev.net, Senegal, the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers and Elsevier to explore how HINARI, AGORA and OARE, three unique public-private partnerships, are working in line with the UN's millennium goals to provide the developing world with access to critical research. The session tackled such critical issues as how this successful public-private partnership is tackling technical issues such as low bandwidth access or rolling out online training to researchers and librarians unfamiliar with online programmes.
Over the past five years, 6000 journals with a subscription value of £3m per year have been made available to researchers in 4,000 developing world institutions, via these three programmes. A recent impact analysis conducted by Elsevier, revealed that over the five-year period from 2002-2006, 105 HINARI countries saw a 63 percent growth in the number of authors publishing in peer-reviewed journals, compared to 38 percent in 102 non-HINARI countries - indicating that HINARI has had a significant impact on the participant countries' ability to engage with the global scientific community.
