ICML9 presents the International Seminar on Open Access for Developing Countries

Initiatives and repositories of electronic journals started to be developed worldwide in the 90´s. Latin America was represented in this movement since the beginning with the launching of SciELO in 1997, along with the first initiatives all over the world. SciELO today is internationally recognized as one of the most successful initiatives of Open Access.

The Open Access political movement began in 2002 with the Budapest Open Archives Initiative declaration and it has been spread to other regions of the world, generating several other declarations of support to this movement.

At the moment while these movements are being widely discussed, the International Seminar on Open Access for Developing Countries is being organized as a parallel section of the ICML 9/CRICS 7 (September 21-22), gathering science editors and information specialists from different parts of the world.

The objective of this event is to bring together various initiatives within the open-access movement and to discuss ways to improve visibility, accessibility, quality, and impact of journals from developing countries.

The key-address conference will be conducted by Paul Uhlir, Director from the Office of International S&T Information Programs, The National Academies (USA), who will present an overview of Open Access main issues.

The two-day seminar will discuss the following topics:

Panel 1 – The open access movement: initiatives
- Open Access and Archiving
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)

Panel 2 – The Open Access movement: challenges and perspectives
- Bringing journals online: challenges for developing countries
- Copyright and intellectual property
- SciELO: lessons for an open access movement for less developed countries

Panel 3 - Visibility, accessibility, quality, and impact of journals
- Open Access Journals and citation patterns
- Open Access journals in Africa
- Open Access journals in India
- Open Access, the SciELO experience: a two-way enterprise
- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

Panel 4 – Open access: other implications for journal publishing
- Language barriers and translation
- Social Sciences and Open Access

Abel L. Packer, Director of BIREME, will coordinate the final session on conclusions and recommendations for the Open Access movement in developing countries.