Web of Science: Bridging the Digital Divide
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Public and private partners team up to facilitate the flow of health
information via the Internet
Major awards for electronic communication in science have been ap-
proved for four centres in Africa (which are all TDR partners in re-
search) and five centres in central Asia and eastern Europe. This is
the first phase of a public/private initiative - the Health Internet-
work project - which aims to boost access by researchers and health
workers to reliable information via the Internet and to improve
global public health by facilitating the flow of information world-
wide.
Partners in the initiative include the World Health Organization
(WHO) and other UN organizations, the Open Society Institute (OSI),
which is part of the Soros Foundation network, leading information
providers ISI(r) and Silver Platter, and other public and private
partners, possibly including the leading scientific publisher El-
sevier.
In the first phase of the study, the nine centres are to be provided
with a 'connectivity package' consisting of hardware, wide band con-
nectivity, full access to several databases and more than 100 medical
journals (online, full text). For their part, the centres will help
work out how to introduce locally-produced information to the Inter-
net, stressing priority public health programmes and local transla-
tion and adaptation of content as necessary. They will also help work
out how to expand the project to the rest of their country and re-
gion, and how to evaluate its impact. The pilot trial will test
whether online delivery of high quality information and international
connectivity addresses the information and communication needs of de-
veloping country researchers.
The four TDR partners selected for the pilot phase are:
* Noguchi Memorial Medical Research Institute, Accra, Ghana
* Malaria Research and Training Centre, University of Mali, Bamako
* Makerere University Medical School, Kampala, Uganda
* National Institute for Medical Research, Dar es Salaam, United Re-
public of Tanzania.
Research, and the sharing of knowledge through research, is fundamen-
tal to improving public health. Through the Health Internetwork pro-
ject, researchers and scientists will begin to "read the same jour-
nals, search the same databases, join in the same discussion groups,
compete for the same grants; it will bring them into the interna-
tional community of researchers and eventually improve the dissemina-
tion of their own results" (Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland, WHO Director
General). The project aims to facilitate research in countries that
have first-hand experience of diseases and health issues that affect
the poor.
As to the roles of the different founding partners, the private part-
ners will focus on organizing comprehensive training for research
staff, while the WHO and UN will discuss provision of high-speed con-
nectivity to the Internet with service providers in the eight initial
countries. NGOs and foundations will provide resources and logistics
support.
After the one-year pilot phase, the intention is to extend the facil-
ity to a large number of needy countries. It is anticipated that, by
the end of 2003, some 13 000 new health information access points in
some 40 countries will be equipped with Internet technology, thus
enabling communication and networking among public health information
users, and improving monitoring of health situations.
Source: http://www.who.int/tdr/publications/tdrnews/news64/web.htm
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