Launch of Online Access to Research in the Environment

In an effort to help reduce great disparities in scientific capital between developed and developing nations, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Yale University, and leading science and technology publishers have launched a new collaborative initiative to make global scientific research in the environmental sciences available online to tens of thousands of environmental scientists, researchers, and policy makers in the developing world for free or at nominal cost. Through Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE), more than 200 prestigious publishers, societies and associations will offer one of the world’s largest collections of scholarly, peer-reviewed environmental science journals to over 1200 public and non-profit environmental institutions in more than 100 developing nations of Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe. ‘OARE is a new and inspiring example of international cooperation that can contribute to the reduction of the North-South scientific gap and digital divide, objectives that are both at the top of the UN agenda and the UN Millennium Development Goals’, said Achim Steiner, UNEP Executive Director.