A few comments on "this gift" : 1) The " giving" is actually be done by the authors of the medical journal articles, not the publishers. The publishers are only passing on what they got for free from authors.
2) Such benevolence on the part of publishers! Give away what you get for free and pass it on to others without invoking any extra distribution costs. And then, down the road, when you have a created a market for online journals in third world countries or those countries increase their per capita income, you then start charging them. A roughly similar model is used by Lexis and Westlaw at law schools; while at law school, students get almost unlimited and "free" access (mind you, the law schools pay a whopping per capita licence fee!) and the students, not surprisingly, get "hooked" on the wonders of electronic legal research. And then when they become lawyers, the students start charging their clients an hourly rate --- a few years ago it was $75 an hour --- for online legal research. Such fees rapidly pay back "the subsidy" handed out during law school. And the winners are? Lexis and Westlaw. 3) I assume this benevolence will also include full access to non-proprietary open source software so that these third world universities, to get access to this information, will not have to rely on Microsoft and pay the absolutely scandalous rates that Microsoft charges. Did you know that a rich university such as Harvard pays exactly the same software licensing fees per desk to Microsoft as does the University of Zimbabwe? But then we read that the Gates Foundation is one of the big backers of this benevolence...and we quickly see that this benevolence is all about creating a second market, this for computer software. 4) And finally I assume that this benevolence will also include significant financial assistance so that scholars at third world universities can increase their contributions to these journals and others. The governing assumption behind this project is that scholars and students at third world universities will be merely the consumers of information/ knowledge from the "advanced countries", never or seldom the producers. Regards Alan Alan Story Kent Law School University of Kent Canterbury Kent U.K CT2 7NS. [email protected] 44 (0)1227 823316
