Research4Life Greatly Expands Peer Reviewed Research Available to Developing World

Research4Life partners announced today that the content available through its collaborative public-private partnership has dramatically increased since 2011 to reach 17,000 peer reviewed scientific journals, books and databases. Research4Life provides over 6,000 institutions in more than 100 developing countries with free or low cost access to peer-reviewed online content from the world's leading scientific, technical and medical publishers. The recent sharp increase in content is primarily a result of Elsevier's contribution of 7,000 books in 2011-2.

The inclusion of Elsevier's entire SciVerse ScienceDirect ebook collection follows the publisher's incremental contributions of 1,700 clinical and science and technology books in 2011. One of the founding members of Research4Life, Elsevier also makes available over 2,000 electronic journals and SciVerse Scopus, an abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature with over 19,500 titles from 5,000 publishers. In 2006 publishers began pioneering the addition of ebooks to Research4Life, including ebook contributions from American Psychiatric Publishing Inc., Oxford University Press, the Worldwatch Institute, CABI, and most recently, John Wiley and Sons who made their Current Protocol book series available through HINARI in 2011.

"The developing world benefits enormously from the online book collections made available by our publisher partners. The new content is a significant addition, more than doubling Research4Life's information resources previously accessible to researchers and practitioners in low- and middle-income countries," said Kimberly Parker, HINARI Programme Manager.

One of the beneficiaries of Research4life, Dr. Patrick Kyamanywa, Dean, Faculty of Medicine National University of Rwanda, welcomes this significant expansion of the initiative's ebook content explaining, "A culture of evidence-based practice can no longer be an option but the rule. The publishers involved in the HINARI project should be praised for their commitment to improving access to information to students, researchers and practitioners in some of the poorest countries in the world.- Elsevier appears to be leading the way and our hope is that other publishers will follow suit and help achieve the target of 'Health Information For All by 2015'."

About Research4Life

Research4Life is the collective name for four public-private partnerships which seek to help achieve the UN's Millennium Development Goals by providing the developing world with access to critical scientific research.

Since 2002, the four programmes, Access to Research in Health (HINARI), Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture (AGORA), Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE) and Access to Research for Development and Innovation (ARDI), have given researchers at more than 6,000 institutions in over 100 developing world countries and territories free or low cost online access to some 17,000 peer-reviewed international scientific journals, books, and databases provided by the world's leading science publishers.