[Irtalk] Open Access helps bridge the "knowledge divide" between North and South - Other News - Globethics.net

[Hilton Gibson]

Launched in 2002, the Open Access movement aims to use the Internet to
remove barriers to accessing scientific and academic publications, and to
"accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with
the poor and the poor with the rich", in the words of the founding document
of the movement, the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

*This is a profoundly ethical issue*, for it is often researchers and
students from the global South who are locked out from access to knowledge
and research - the cost of accessing a single journal article can range
from US$30 to $US40 from some of the world's main academic publishers.

Not only can it be prohibitively expensive to gain access to the results of
research but such practices also accentuate a "knowledge divide" between
the global north and south. Moreover, while there is a vast and unmet need
for access to knowledge resources in the global South, there are
substantial and significant barriers to the visibility of work from the
countries of the South in other parts of the world.

http://www.globethics.net/web/ge/news/other-news/-/asset_publisher/uK4o/content/open-access-helps-bridge-the-knowledge-divide-between-north-and-south
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.lib.sun.ac.za/pipermail/irtalk/attachments/20141102/0ec8d97f/attachment.html>