From: technews <technews@ou.edu>
To: "'it-fyi@listserv.ou.edu'" <it-fyi@lists.ou.edu>
Subject: it-fyi: Cornell Offers Developing Nations Digital Journals (Chron
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 1999 11:44:25 -0600
Cornell U. Offers Developing Nations Digital Journals on Agriculture
By KELLY McCOLLUM
A project at Cornell University is providing developing countries with
much-needed aid -- in the form of digital journals on agricultural research.
The project, the Essential Electronic Agricultural Library, compresses four
years' worth of text from 140 agricultural and life-science publications
onto 173 CD-ROM's. The journals, whose subjects include soil sciences, food
chemistry, and veterinary medicine, are intended to help agricultural
scientists conduct their research and teach their students. While the
collection is not meant as an aid for farmers, many of the researchers who
will use it routinely share their work with farmers through local extension
offices.
According to Wallace Olsen, the project's director, journal collections in
libraries in many developing countries are plagued by theft, mutilation, and
decay due to hot, humid climates. And many libraries can't afford the cost
of international subscriptions. In some countries, Mr. Wallace says, budgets
for subscriptions vary widely from year to year, so journal runs are left
with gaping holes. "Many of the collections have been described as
'Swiss-cheese collections,'" he says.
"It is a mammoth library," says Mr. Wallace of the digital archive, which
contains publications from around the world from 1993 to 1996. The set
includes a CD-ROM with an index to the publications and software for using
the journals on a P.C. running Windows 95. Colleges and government research
organizations in 104 developing countries are eligible to buy the collection
for $10,000 -- far less than the estimated $375,000 cost of subscribing to
the journals individually for four years.
Before creating the collection, Mr. Wallace and his colleagues investigated
what journals and areas of research would be most useful to scientists in
developing countries. They looked at which publications were most often
cited, and worked with researchers in developing countries to find what
information they needed most.
After compiling a list of about 300 publications, the project's designers
set about their most onerous task -- obtaining the necessary permissions
from the journal publishers.
"We were happy to do it," says John Tagler, director of communications for
Elsevier Science, which has about 30 journals in the collection. But
Elsevier, the world's largest commercial publisher of scholarly journals,
and other publishers were worried that giving away content to the project
would cut into their journals' subscription bases.
"We're asked often to provide special offers or donations to the developing
world, but what made this interesting was that we really were positive about
Cornell," says Mr. Tagler. He says the project's organizers made a number of
changes to assuage the publishers' fears.
The list of eligible countries, for example, omits several that fall into
the World Bank's classification of developing countries but are wealthy
enough that their institutions might be able to afford journal
subscriptions. Some countries with records of rampant copyright violation
are not eligible, because publishers feared having their products pirated.
Participating publishers receive no compensation for their contributions.
Cornell is also offering annual updates to the collection, but those
articles will not be available to customers until about two years after they
are first published. According to Mr. Tagler, that practice will allow
publishers to continue to sell first-run subscriptions to institutions that
need up-to-date research.
One of the most comforting thoughts for publishers, according to Mr. Olsen,
is that the CD-ROM collection is putting the journals into untapped markets.
"The people in developing countries can't afford to buy them anyway," he
says.
Mr. Olsen says the project, which was started with grants from the
Rockefeller Foundation, should be self-sustaining beginning in January. But
he says the project will need to raise additional money to publicize the
collection further.
Most of the project's sales thus far have been to African countries, says
Mr. Olsen, but Cornell has received orders from organizations in Bangladesh,
Indonesia, Nepal, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Researchers in South America
have also expressed interest in the collection, he says.
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Copyright 1999 by The Chronicle of Higher Education