3.4 Recommendations - InterAcademy Council

Information needed to promote and build S&T capacity - subscriptions to professional journals, for example, and textbooks - should be made available on the World Wide Web for free, or at modest cost, to scientists and engineers from developing nations. The InterAcademy Panel (IAP), International Council for Science (ICSU), UNESCO, World Bank, regional development banks, and foundations should all promote this fundamental objective.
Efforts to provide digital copies of back issues of scientific and engineering journals should be intensified, and the full range of these materials gradually posted for free and universal access, with a focus on reaching S&T professionals in developing nations.
The print journals presently publishing should be encouraged to post selected articles in electronic form concurrently with their paper publication; and to reduce the time between the appearance of the latest issue of the journal and its posting.
A major international effort should be supported to ensure that a digital-format basic-science library is made available to libraries in developing nations.
As much as possible of the scientific, engineering, and medical literature should be put in digital form on the World Wide Web for access from remote areas. In that spirit, new approaches should be explored for replacing copyrights with more suitable ways of protecting IPR and rewarding innovators, while supporting the public interest in having broad and rapid access to knowledge.
Major hubs in the developing world should be organized for sharing digital information with research institutions in the industrialized world. This will facilitate access to some materials (in video format, for example) that require a wide bandwidth not necessarily available everywhere. It will also serve the eminently sensible goal of backing up original material.
Libraries should maintain electronic gateways for the sharing of digital information among researchers, teachers, and learners.
Interlibrary loans in electronic form should be encouraged in the interests of efficiency and effectiveness. Various ways to ease fears of excess copying, from using established conventions to self-limiting or time-bound software, should be explored.