To help reduce great disparities in scientific resources between developed and developing nations, Yale University, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and leading science and technology publishers have launched a new collaborative initiative to make global scientific research in the environmental sciences available online to environmental scientists, researchers and policymakers in the developing world for free or at nominal cost.

Through Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE), more than 200 prestigious publishers, societies and associations will offer one of the worldÂ’s largest collections of scholarly, peer-reviewed environmental science journals to over 1,200 public and nonprofit environmental institutions in 106 developing nations in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean and Eastern Europe. Every institution enrolled in OARE will receive resources with an annual retail subscription valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Institutions eligible to enroll in OARE include universities and colleges, research institutes, ministries of the environment and other government agencies, libraries and national nongovernmental organizations. Access for institutions in the 70 poorest countries will be free. Access for institutions in 38 lower-middle-income countries will be for a nominal charge; monies raised will be reinvested to support continued training and outreach activities in eligible countries.

“OARE is a new and inspiring example of international cooperation that can contribute to the reduction of the North-South scientific gap and digital divide, which are at the top of the United Nations agenda and the U.N. Millennium Development Goals,” said Achim Steiner, undersecretary general of the United Nations and executive director of UNEP.

“Thanks to advances in information and communication technologies and the great generosity of many leading scientific publishers and foundations, we have an unprecedented opportunity to provide environmental institutions in developing countries with intellectual resources that we in the developed world so often take for granted,” said Gus Speth, dean of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.

Over 1,000 scholarly scientific and technical journal titles in such fields as biotechnology, botany, climate change, ecology, energy, environmental chemistry, environmental economics, environmental engineering and planning, environmental law and policy, environmental toxicology and pollution, geography, geology, hydrology, meteorology, oceanography, urban planning and zoology will be provided through a portal presented in English, Spanish and French. OARE will also provide important Abstract and Index Research Databases, which are intellectual tools the scientific and professional community use to search for information within thousands of scholarly publications.

OARE aims to contribute to the development of expert professional and academic communities and an informed public, encourage scientific creativity and productivity and facilitate the development of progressive science-based national policies. It will also help enable countries to build their own higher education programs in the environmental sciences, educate their own leaders, conduct their own research, publish their own scientific findings and disseminate information to policymakers and the public.

“Scientific publishers welcome this opportunity to provide access to the latest published research in environmental and related sciences to researchers and other professionals in developing countries,” said Michael Mabe, CEO of the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM). “We expect that, in turn, higher-quality research will emerge from those countries, to the benefit of all of us.”

“The Hewlett Foundation is committed to providing high-quality educational materials to students and scholars in the developing world. We are pleased to join with Yale, UNEP and the many participating publishers, societies and associations to make scientific resources available in developing countries, where the need is so great,” said Paul Brest, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Organizations providing scientific content through OARE include leading scientific publishers (e.g. Annual Reviews, Blackwell, Cambridge, Elsevier, John Wiley, Nature Publishing Group, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Oxford and many others) and more than 200 scientific societies and associations (e.g. Académie des Sciences de France, American Association for the Advancement of Science, National Academy of Sciences, Nordic Society OIKOS, Oceanographic Society of Japan, Real Sociedad Espaniola de Qimica, Royal Geographical Society, Royal Meteorological Society of Great Britain, Societa Botanica Italiana, Zoological Society of London, etc.). A complete listing of collaborating institutions is available at www.oaresciences.org.

OARE will be coordinated by UNEP and Yale University in association with STM and 30 leading science and technology publishing houses. Support is provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. OARE will be managed in close cooperation with the Health Internetwork Access to Research Initiative, launched by the World Health Organization in 2001 to provide research to the medical community in developing nations, and Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture, launched by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and Cornell University in 2003 to provide research to the agricultural community.

For more information about OARE, visit www.oaresciences.org