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Bandwidth and Open Access in Developing Countries

Scientific American - Posted: September 23rd, 2012, 1:14pm EDT

p One of the creeds of the open access movement is that free access to literature aides the transfer of knowledge from wealthier, better funded nations to researchers in developing nations. There is little to no doubt that increased access to research results has beneficial reverberations in several directions #8211; but like many hypothetical benefits, they only work well if those on the receiving end can efficiently reap those benefits./ppOpen access works in a number of ways, but the most common are the author-pays model (referred to as gold open access) and the institutional repository model (part of what is referred to as green open access). The author-pays model has several issues associated with it, namely that the author(s) must secure funds to publish their work. This is often untenable no matter what country you work in or what your funding situation may be. For the repository system to work, institutions or individuals must set up and maintain #8211; at their own expense #8211; servers with an online database of their staff#8217;s research results. Both remove costs from the reader, though. To summarize how costs are distributed:/p a href=http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=bandwidth-and-open-access-in-developing-countries[More]/a

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