Open archiving opportunities for developing countries: towards equitable distribution of global knowledge

Although the World Wide Web is less than a decade old, it already has had a profound impact on scientific publishing and scholarly communication. In particular, open standards and low-cost networking tools are opening many possibilities for reducing and even eliminating entirely the cost barriers to scientific publications. One development that has great potential value for poorly-resourced countries is "open archiving", or the deposition of scholarly research papers into networked servers accessible over the Internet. This process allows scientists in the south to retrieve research results from the north through an online interoperable mechanism. Equally, it allows scientists in the south to contribute to the global knowledge base through participation. The purpose of this article is to inform scientists and publishers in the developing world about this and related initiatives and so allow informed decisions to be made about participation. Our intention is not to provide technical details about electronic publishing and the set up of "eprint" servers for open archiving, but rather to focus on the strategic significance of open archiving for scientists from developing countries