AIP Provides Access to its Journal Content to More than 90 Developing Countries

Melville, NY, 19 February 2008 - AIP is proud to announce the signing of two agreements that will provide greater access to its journals in the developing world. One is with the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP); the other is with the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP).

ICTP offers a free electronic journal document delivery service (eJDS) to researchers in developing countries classified as “low income” and “lower middle income” by the World Bank. AIP now allows ICTP to distribute journal articles without charge to registered scientists in more than 90 such countries, from Algeria to Vanuatu. “In fact,” notes Douglas LaFrenier, AIP’s director of publication sales and market development, “we are allowing ICTP to deliver articles even from journals to which ICTP itself does not subscribe.”

“Researchers from developing countries are all too often frustrated by inadequate facilities and professional isolation,” said ICTP library director Lucio Visintin. “The eJournal Delivery Service was designed to offer them the access to scientific literature they could never get otherwise. Thanks to the partnership with AIP, ICTP can promote the advancement of science in developing countries at a higher level. We have been very pleased to see how deeply such an important publisher understands and generously supports this philanthropic initiative.”

The International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) works in developing countries to build the infrastructure to support scientific and scholarly communication. This includes IT training, library development, and services for researchers, authors, and editors. AIP’s agreement with INASP will provide low-cost access to its full-text journal collection in 21 countries in Africa, Asia, and South America. For these partner countries, AIP is making its journals available through a country-wide license for a nominal fee. “AIP embraces this opportunity as a chance to further its mission to advance the science of physics,” said Mark Cassar, AIP’s publisher, “which is important to us regardless of revenue considerations.”

AIP has also agreed to provide metadata to the ELIN database at the University of Lund in Sweden, which allows researchers in INASP partner countries to interact with the metadata records based on local area network traffic and not wider Internet information transfers. This is a significant benefit for institutions that have limited external internet connectivity, but which have reasonable local area networks.

“INASP is very pleased that AIP has chosen to make its content more accessible to researchers in developing countries,” said Lucy Browse, head of information delivery for INASP. “We hope it will offer an example to other scientific societies, as well.”