Cutting-edge Science for All

Physicists and mathematicians from the developing world face daunting challenges in their pursuit of knowledge, from a shortage of specialists in their fields to inadequate research facilities.

Lack of subscriptions to international science journals is still another common problem, due to cost and technical issues. But thanks to an innovative ICTP programme, access to the latest scientific articles is just a mouse-click away.

For the past decade, the Centre's electronic Journals Delivery Service (eJDS) has advanced scientific knowledge by providing free, easy access to scientific articles via e-mail to scientists in developing countries who lack sufficient bandwidth to download material from the Internet in a timely manner and/or cannot afford the connection.

Thanks to ICTP's carefully arranged agreements with some of the world's leading scientific publishers, scientists who live and work in least-developed or low-income countries can receive current scientific literature from more than 800 journals. The publishers have established a set of criteria for those who can use the service, and have set limits to the number of articles per journal that can be accessed each day (three), month (12) and year (100).

The agreements have been a win-win situation for everyone, says Enrique Canessa, one of the founders of eJDS, a concept that was conceived in January 2001 by former ICTP staff scientist Hilda Cerdeira.  "Developing-world scientists have access to a much wider range of current scientific information and findings than ever before, and publishers are able to reach researchers who would otherwise have neither the technical nor the financial means to access information from their journals in a timely fashion," he explains.

Canessa, of the Centre's Science Dissemination Unit (SDU), and Clement Onime of ICTP's Information and Communication Technology Section developed the original, open-source software, known as www4mail, which powered eJDS. This homegrown application allowed users to navigate the Internet offline, and to search the Internet via email. Over the years the two, with support from SDU, have refined the delivery service, which now allows users to follow hyperlinks as if they were surfing the web via a live Internet connection.

"Today this experiment is a robust, well-known service that serves thousands of scientists world-wide, providing a crucial informational lifeline to the global scientific community," says Cannessa.

The eJDS now has 4,161 registered users from 142 countries, and that number is expected to grow as the service launches a renewed interface with the assistance of the Trieste-based SISSA MediaLab. ICTP's Marie Curie Library manages subscriptions to the service, and administers the new eJDS system.

The upgraded eJDS will be presented at the workshop 'ICTP eJournals Delivery Service (eJDS) for Scientists in Developing Countries - 10th Anniversary' on 8 June in Trieste, where this important milestone will be celebrated along with a view to the future. Canessa and Cerdeira say the workshop will review why eJDS is still necessary today and how to adapt new realities and technologies to achieve its primary goal in an ever-faster changing world.

For more information:
http://ejds.ictp.it/
E-mail: ejds@ictp.it