The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) recently announced the creation of a portal that “presents a current snapshot of the status of Open Access (OA) to scientific information around the world. For countries that have been more successful implementing Open Access, the portal highlights critical success factors and aspects of the enabling environment. For countries and regions that are still in the early stages of Open Access development, the portal identifies key players, potential barriers and opportunities. The Global Open Access Portal is designed to provide the necessary information for policy-makers to learn about the global OA environment and to view their country’s status, and understand where and why Open Access has been most successful.” The project was funded by Colombia, Denmark, Norway, and the U.S.
In an interview with SciDev.net, Raoul Kamadjeu, co-founder of the Pan African Medical Journal, said that “It’s good to see that UNESCO is joining, in concrete terms, the OA bandwagon,” but he worried that there are barriers to success: “The barrier will not be technical — computer or Internet connectivity — but motivational; why will I need to go there in the first place? Will they [researchers] even know it exists?”
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