[GKD] WHO to Make Medical Journals Available to Dev. Countries

[bertrandi]

WHO PRESS RELEASE WHO/32  9 JULY
(voir la version francaise plus bas)

WHO AND TOP PUBLISHERS ANNOUNCE BREAKTHROUGH ON DEVELOPING COUNTRIES'
ACCESS TO LEADING BIOMEDICAL JOURNALS

London - The World Health Organization and the world's six biggest
medical journal publishers today announce a new initiative which will
enable close to 100 developing countries to gain access to vital
scientific information that they otherwise could not afford.

The arrangement agreed to by the six publishers would allow almost 1000
of the world's leading medical and scientific journals to become
available through the Internet to medical schools and research
institutions in developing countries for free or at deeply-reduced
rates. Overseeing the signing of the Statement of Intent by senior
executives of the publishers, Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland, Director-General
of WHO, said: "As a direct consequence of this arrangement, many
thousands of doctors, researchers and health policy-makers among others
will be able to use the best-available scientific evidence to an
unprecedented degree to help them improve the health of their
populations. It is perhaps the biggest step ever taken towards reducing
the health information gap between rich and poor countries." Until now,
biomedical journal subscriptions, both electronic and print, have been
priced uniformly for medical schools, research centres and similar
institutions irrespective of geographical location. Annual subscription
prices cost on average several hundred dollars per title. Many key
titles cost more than $1500 per year. This has made it all but
impossible for the large majority of health and research institutions in
the poorest countries to access critical scientific information.

Scheduled to start in January 2002, the initiative is expected to last
for at least 3 years while being monitored for progress. It will benefit
bona fide academic and research institutions, which depend on timely
access to biomedical journals. Between now and the end of this year,
these institutions will be identified individually and the process put
in place so that they can receive and use access authentication. All
parties-the publishers and the participating institutions will learn
from this experience. Decisions about how to proceed after the
initiative will grow from the precedents it sets, and will be informed
by the working relationships which have developed among the partners.
The initiative is an important step in the establishment of the Health
InterNetwork, a project introduced by United Nations' Secretary-General
Kofi Annan at the UN Millennium Summit last year. Led by WHO, the Health
InterNetwork aims to strengthen public health services by providing
public health workers, researchers and policy makers access to
high-quality, relevant and timely health information through an Internet
portal. It further aims to improve communication and networking. As key
components, the project will provide training as well as information and
communication technology applications for public health. Working with
the British Medical Journal and the Open Society Institute of the Soros
foundation network, WHO approached the 6 biggest medical journal
publishers, Blackwell, Elsevier Science, the Harcourt Worldwide STM
Group, Wolters Kluwer International Health & Science, Springer Verlag
and John Wiley, with the aim of bringing them together with the
countries concerned to seek a more affordable pricing structure for
online access to their international biomedical journals. The outcome is
a tiered-pricing model developed by the publishers that will make nearly
1000 of the 1240 top international biomedical journals available to
institutions in the 100 poorest countries free of charge or at
significantly reduced rates.

For further information, journalists can contact Mr Gregory Hartl, WHO
Spokesperson, WHO, Geneva. Telephone (+41 22) 791 4458; Fax (+41 22) 791
4858; Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] All WHO Press Releases, Fact Sheets and
Features as well as other information on this subject can be obtained on
Internet on the WHO home page http://www.who.int/

 ***
COMMUNIQUE DE PRESSE OMS/329 juillet

L'OMS ET LES PRINCIPAUX EDITEURS ANNONCENT UN PROGRES DECISIF DANS
L'ACCES DES PAYS EN DEVELOPPEMENT AUX GRANDES REVUES BIOMEDICALES

Londres - L'organisation mondiale de la SantE et les six principaux
Editeurs de revues mEdicales ont annoncE aujourd'hui une nouvelle
initiative qui permettra * prEes de 100 pays en dEveloppement, qui n'en
auraient pas eu les moyens autrement, d'avoir accEes aux informations
scientifiques essentielles. Cette disposition prise d'un commun accord
par les six Editeurs permettra de mettre sur Internet * la disposition
des Ecoles de mEdecine et des instituts de recherche dans les pays en
dEveloppement prEes de 1 000 publications mEdicales et scientifiques de
pointe, gratuitement ou * des prix trEes rEduits. PrEsente lors de l

[GKD]: India's Bank of Ideas

[Frederick Noronha]

Thanks to Irfan Khan for drawing this to our attention... FN

>From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fri Jul  6 01:40:49 2001

[Sristi's website address: http://www.sristi.org/ ]


13 May, 2001

India's bank of ideas


By Peter Day in Ahmedabad 

<...>

I go to Ahmedabad to have lunch with a tableful of some of the most
ingenious people I have ever met - inventors and gadgeteers from the
fields and villages of rural India where 700 million of its one billion
people still live. Over rice and dhal and vegetables eaten with the
hand, they talk excitedly about their inventions and ideas.


Innovations

Thakershibhai is a farmer who had only a primary school education. A
small man, his body tenses as he tells the story of how after one of the
region's frequent droughts, his son spotted a rogue variety of groundnut
flourishing while other breeds failed.

Thakershibhai nursed the seed - and bred a new variety of tastier,
hardier nut which he now sells to his fellow farmers, who have honoured
him by naming it Thakershi.

>From another village in Gujarat has come Amrutbhai Agrewat, a stocky
serial inventor who has taken the traditional bullock cart and rebuilt
it with a tilting device so that composting need no longer be done by
hand - arduous work traditionally reserved for women.

Another boon for village women is the simple device Mr Agrewat devised
for the well. By adding a locking mechanism to the rope and pulley
mechanism used for centuries, women can rest their load while hauling up
the bucket, making the job much less strenuous than it has ever been
before.

A bespectacled retired schoolteacher Khimjibhai Kanadia has come up with
a stream of inventions in recent years.

Simplest of all is the device for filling plastic bags with soil in
which to plant seedlings.

Mr Kanadia took a plastic drainpipe seven or eight inches long, and cut
it off at an angle at the bottom. Placed in the plastic bag, the women
on piecework can fill one sack in one scoop, increasing their
productivity - and their pay - fourfold. This is pure joy, a simple
invention of genius.

And there are hundreds, if not thousands more of them, all gathered
together under the auspices of an organisation called the Society for
Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Innovation;
"Sristi" for short, the Sanskrit for "creation".


Ideas database

Sristi is the brainchild of the man who brought together all these
village inventors to meet me.

Anil Gupta is a professor from the Institute of Management with an
engaging manner and a bushy beard who 10 years ago was troubled by the
fact that the people he wrote about in his published papers could not
read them because they were only in English.

To communicate the excellence of the ideas he was encountering in
village India, he started something called the Honey Bee Network, based
around a magazine describing these sort of innovations in eight
different languages.

The organisation now has 10,000 ideas on a computer database - local
lore and the inventions of dozens of village boffins available to
inquirers, and to companies who want to licence the ideas and pay for
them.

"Why should intellectual property merely benefit big corporations?" asks
Professor Gupta, as he encourages businesses to pay the equivalent of
hundreds of pounds to make things such as the tilting bullock cart.

There is a new venture capital fund to back good ideas. The Sristi
organisation also has a laboratory to test thousands of village remedies
culled from plants such as the fragrant neam tree. Three phials hold
herbal extracts used by villagers to treat foot-and-mouth disease.

"We don't slaughter our animals, we treat them," observes the professor,
referring to the mass culling of cattle in the UK.

Unlike the rest of the Indian Institute of Management, the Honey Bee
Network will create few billionaires. But its flood of ideas (and the
money they generate) have the potential to help millions of people all
over the globe who remain little touched by what we call the modern
world.


Link:
Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad
http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/index.htm


http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/from_our_own_correspondent/newsid_132
4000/1324892.stm




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Re: [GKD] Development Gateway

[John Hibbs]

Deirdre Williams makes a point we will try to bring home during Global
Learn Day5, October 7. The point is - with dedicated human beings
worldwide, all volunteer - we will use telephone, telephony, web
streaming, voice recordings, text chat, and - yes - RADIO. (We plan to
have a weekly radio program featuring distance education, training and
telework starting in November). Participating speakers, panelists and
the radio stations will do so by regular phones link ups with
"attendance" inside or Franklin Telephone room. (Yesterday, in an
experiment we conduct weekly, our host, Richard Seltzer called this the
Rube-Goldberg Technology Bag...I thought that comment was right square
on the mark!) Only very dedicated HUMANS can all this in place!

The GLD5 audience will have choices whether to listen (free) with
software options from PalTalk, Real Media, Windows Media, Clearphone,
DialPad, Internet radio...and, if they are within the footprint of a
participating radio station, on the ground there as well.They can also
listen in by way of a regular telephone call to our POTS telephone room.
{The per minute costs for those in Canada and the USA will be only two
U.S. cents a minute; in Western Europe and most of Latin America the
cost will be less than 15 U.S. cents a minute; and for most of the rest
of the world not more than 40 U.S cents a minute.}

All of the 24 hour webcast from all 24 time zones will be archived for
web listening or for subsequent shipment to conventional community radio
stations, worldwide.

 

We want to increase our contacts with community radio stations worldwide
and are looking for all the help we can get.

 *

Those who can assist with this effort will find my INSTANT attention -
please mark your subject line with the word "radio" in it.

Finally thisThere are many planks that will build the thousands of
bridges necessary to cross The Divide. Telecenters, the telephone and
radio may well be the strongest of those planks. I invite all of you to
look at the pages under my signature, and to re-read a very nice post
from Deirdre (offered again here.)

John Hibbs
www.bfranklin.edu/gld5
www.bfranklin.edu/gld5/radio.htm
www.bfranklin.edu/gld5/telecenter.htm
www.bfranklin.edu/gld5/speakers.htm

At 4:41 PM -0500 07/06/01, D. Williams wrote:
>To add to my previous reply, (see below) why not mixed technologies?
>Radio phone-in programmes are very popular here. Why not carry out the
>major global sharing using the sophisticated (and expensive) systems,
>and then "download", using information specialists as required, to
>answer queries relayed through radio programmes. Frederick Noronha
>described for me a system like this in Sri Lanka, and Mr. Gopaul, the
>Information Officer at Caribbean Environmental Health Institute (CEHI)
>here discussed with me the possibilty of a similar system. In each case
>the context of the discussion was how to disseminate the very valuable
>information found on the Humanity Library Series CDs, in places where
>computer equipment is not generally accessible, printing is very
>expensive, and the people who need the information are not necessarily
>literate.
>
>A similar suggestion was also made on the list some time ago by someone
>writing from the Phillipines. Unfortunately a recent comprehensive
>computer crash here has robbed me of my record of that correspondence,
>but I think his name is Roberto Verzola.
>
>What is really needed are "human interfaces" - information extension
>officers - super reference librarians, who can close the gap between the
>ICT provided resource and the person with the problem. Who said
>librarians were on the way out?




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Re: [GKD] RFI: Insuring ICT installations

[Profitinafrica]

Dear List Participants,

This reply was drafted in response to a posting of the problem on
another listserve .. maybe it can be helpful in this arena.


INSURING TELECENTRE EQUIPMENT

This is an area where we have not been well served by the prevailing
official development assistance (ODA) community and the public sector
model for development investment. Government and the public sector has
little concept of the value of its assets, the balance sheet of their
operations and the financial management dimension of development and
sustainable business.

In my past I was responsible for "risk management" for a US based
business with operations in 26 countries around the world. There was no
US insurance company that would insure our international assets at a
reasonable rate, and I suspect that the situation is even worse today
than it was some years back. Our solution was to "self insure", in
effect creating our own "insurance  fund". We expected to lose one way
or another around 2% of our assets every  year ... so we charged
ourselves a premium of 4% a year on the  replacement cost of the assets.

Our insurance fund made a profit, because we also worked very hard on
reducing our losses by prudent management. If my memory serves me right,
our actual losses were usually less than 1%. We considered the fact
that we were operating in 26 countries to be a major factor in our
abilitity to self insure because, in fact, the risk was substantially
reduced because of the  multi-country spread of our operations.

We also recognised that it was possible, but not likely, that there
might be  a real catastrophe and we would lose, say 50% of all our
assets. This would, of course, wipe out the company, and though
unlikely was a risk we were not  prepared to take. We arranged with
Lloyds in London for reinsurance so that  in the event of a very big
loss we could claim against the bigger insurance  pool represented by
Lloyds. We paid a modest premium for this resinsurance.  We never had to
make a claim so it was good business for Lloyds. We had  protection from
calamity.

If there is an interest in putting an insurance pool together along the
lines of this outline, I would be please to take part in its
coordination. It seems like something that should be done. The Nakaseke
telecentre should be a wake  up call to us all.

With regards

Peter Burgess

__
T. Peter Burgess
President and CEO
AfriFund Management Limited
1173A Second Avenue #221
New York NY 10021
Tel 212 772 6918 Fax 707 371 7805
website: www.afrifund.com or www.profitinafrica.com 
email:   [EMAIL PROTECTED]


Geoffrey Williams wrote:

> Regarding the recent burning of Nakaseke telecentre:
> It was proposed at the time, and many people have
> suggested it over time, that telecentres purchase
> insurance. But we are finding it very difficult to
> find affordable insurance for telecentres, especially
> when they are in several different countries, and in
> poor communities.
> 
> Does anybody know of an affordable way for a
> non-profit to insure technology equipment in locations
> that are "off the beaten path"?




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