development

FACTS Reports is a unique forum that will publish manuscripts and opinion pieces related to field-based activities within various topic areas: economics, health, education, agriculture, urban planning and environmental issues. FACTS will focus on activities in developing countries and impoverished areas of developed countries. During its first stage, FACTS will develop journals devoted to economic development and health.

Objectives
The goal of this journal is to collect and disseminate knowledge and best practices on field activities. Many professionals work in developing countries to address issues related to economics, health, agriculture, education, environment and development in general. Frequently, these activities do not have an evaluation component or when an evaluation does occur, no forum exists to communicate results to a broader audience. Consequently, knowledge is capitalized poorly resulting in the perpetuation of bad practices and lack of recognition and visibility for good practices. The aim of FACTS Reports is to fill this gap.
FACTS Reports will include peer review with a requirement that peers work in the field themselves. This process will ensure critical input from world experts, allow for cooperation and competition among authors, and promote a high level of science.

Readership
FACTS reports will provide a platform of communication and exchange among field-based professionals. It will improve communication, evaluation of methods, capitalisation of knowledge, and recognition of best practices. In a second stage, FACTS will promote other activities such as training courses, symposia, and educational awards.
Subject Coverage
Suitable topics for FACTS Reports related to economy, development and health include, but are not limited to:
• Development finance
• Education, employment policies
• Social policies
• Trade capacity building, actions related to globalization
• Rural development
• Evaluation methods
• Health care delivery
• Pharmaceutical pricing and drug distribution
• Public health delivery
• Access to health care
• Equity in health care distribution
• Novel health care and public health delivery technologies and methodologies
• Effective practice
• Health promotion
• Health education
• Health systems and health care supply
• Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in health projects

Specific Notes for Authors
Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. All papers are refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors and other
relevant information for submitting papers are available on the Guidelines for authors www.institut.veolia.org/en/facts-initiative.aspx

Editors and Notes
Contributions should be sent in MS Word format attached to an e-mail (details in Author Guidelines) to the following:
Nadia CAÏD
Development Director
Institut Veolia Environment
15, rue des Sablons
75116 Paris
Tel: +33 1 53 43 22 70
E-mail: nadia.caid@institut.veolia.org
With a copy to: FACTS Editorial Office
E-mail: facts.initiative@institut.veolia.org

Hello together,

this blog comes in two versions, short and long. If you are not sure what Open Access (OA) means, take a look at Wikipedia's description here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access .

SHORT: Students now have their own Open Access platform, Open Students
www.openstudents.org .

LONG:
Those of you who have already written longer scientific texts (e.g. assignments, bachelor, master or PhD theses, or research papers) will have experienced situations in which some particularly relevant piece of information seemed to be hidden in an article you did not have at hand.

What you would normally do in such situations is to check whether Google Scholar ( http://scholar.google.com ) or some other search engine can locate the paper for you, which is often the case, especially for articles published during the last decade. The problems start when you want to access the full text version - fewer and fewer university libraries can afford the high subscription fees publishers charge for providing access to the full text (this publishing model is generally called subscription-based, or toll-access), and even if your university is among the lucky ones, this does not mean you get access to the article while off campus, even if non-paper versions exist.

In many cases, the publisher will provide an option to buy electronic versions of the article (for typically some dozens of Euros or equivalent), and document delivery companies provide similar services (usually scanned versions) for older articles. Both options are rarely compatible with a student's financial budget, though.

In developing countries, libraries and students generally have further constraints, especially in terms of budget, but some initiatives exist to reduce that burden somehow. For example, Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture (AGORA; www.aginternetwork.org), Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI; www.who.int/hinari/) and Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE; www.oaresciences.org/) provide free online access to the contents of many peer-reviewed scientific journals to most of the poorest countries of the world. A more comprehensive list of such initiatives is available via www.ifpri.org/library/devresources.asp .

Technically, there is no need to restrict free online access to developing countries, and so publishers like www.plos.org, www.biomedcentral.com or www.copernicus.org provide free access to all of the articles in journals they publish (a strategy called "Gold" Open Access), while others don't do that but allow authors to self-archive the final versions of their manuscripts (either the accepted drafts or the copy-edited final published articles) on their personal or institutional websites (a strategy labeled "Green" Open Access). To find out about the self-archiving policy of a particular journal, check http://romeo.eprints.org/ ; for detailed accounts of almost anything Open Access, see Peter Suber's blog at www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html .

Recently, a number of funding agencies (e.g. www.nih.gov) have issued policies demanding that publications resulting from the research that they fund must be made freely available to the public (i.e. via either Green or Gold OA). The reasoning behind this is (somewhat abbreviated; there have recently been a number of conferences organized on this topic) that the funder who had financed the research already has a low incentive to pay extra money to a third party (the publisher) for reading the results, especially since all the essential aspects of scientific publishing are normally done for free by researchers - those who had received the grant write an article, while other researchers in the field (their peers) review it.

This gets us back to the students' perspective: If students have the possibility to access any scientific article or - via tools like the BioText Search Engine (http://biosearch.berkeley.edu) - their figures or other supplementary information, they stand good chances to learn more effectively than the traditional way. It is thus natural that students will enjoy and profit from Open Access to research findings, and that's precisely the message I perceive behind the creation of the new web platform www.openstudents.org . In my eyes, this is an important additional step towards a collaborative global society, especially since many experienced researchers still hesitate to embrace the OA concept, mainly for reasons of tradition.

Further such steps to more interactive ways of studying will certainly include collaborative platforms like www.wikimedia.org or www.opensource.org and online lectures like MIT's OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/courses/index.htm) or those collected by the World Lecture Project (www.world-lecture-project.org ; a WAYS partner). New ways of planning, funding, conducting, reporting, discussing and explaining scientific research (e.g. www.biogeosciences.net or www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/) or running a campus (www.thescholarship.com ; another WAYS partner) will also be part of this excitingly developing story, as will many things currently not or not widely known.

Finally, a nice way of interacting between and beyond students are, of course, blogs like this one, and the option to comment on them.

Daniel Mietchen

Details at
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/node2175.html .

It is with pleasure that I announce that two of the keynote addresses at the above-mentioned conference are to be presented by WAYS Africa members.
Dr Archana Bhaw-Luximon and Dr Henry Roman will be making presentations at this important event for young scientists in Africa.