No access to Scholarly Journals in Bangladesh



The British Medical Journal

Another round of sad news for researchers in Bangladesh came in as they would be denied free access to 2500 scholarly journals! The British Medical Journal (BMJ) in its January 11^th issue said: Five publishers have withdrawn free access to more than 2500 health and biomedical online journals from institutions in Bangladesh. One research leader has described the situation as “very discouraging.”

Speaking of Medicine put its strongest reaction in protest of this decision, as it writes:

“In our opinion, this would be a retrograde step since, owing to the commercial nature of the journals in question, the same situation will inevitably arise in the future. Donor programmes do nothing to build research capacity, and access is governed by marketing decisions rather than research needs. The Electronic Publishing Trust for Development has been working in partnership with many other organisations (including Bioline International , SciELO , MedKnow Publications, and Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS) ) to promote the development benefits of open access journals and archived articles in open access institutional repositories.

But in the face of powerful UN organisations (WHO, UNEP, FAO) and commercial publishers of prestigious journals offering ‘free access’ it has been difficult to persuade dependent communities that open access is sustainable and could do much to strengthen research in poorer countries”.