For countries in the middle tier (GNP per capita between $1k
and $3k), online subscriptions will be discounted by an amount to be
decided this June. Countries in the top tier pay full price.
The six participating publishers are Blackwell Synergy, Elsevier
Science Direct, Harcourt IDEAL, Springer Link, Wiley Interscience, and
Wolters Kluwer. The subscriptions are given to universities and
research institutions, not to individuals. But they are identical in
scope to the subscriptions received by institutions paying the full
price."
Of 500 bottom-tier eligible institutions, more than 200 have already
signed up. Additional publishers have joined this 3-5 years program and
most biomedical journals are already on offer. Mid-tier pricing will be
declared by January next year. HINARI will probably be expanded to
cover other scientific disciplines.
Authors from developing countries also benefit from the spread of free
online scholarship coupled with differential pricing. "Best of
Science", for example, a free, peer-reviewed, online science journal
subsists on fees paid by the authors. It charges authors from
developing countries less.
But differential pricing is unlikely to be confined to scholarly
journals.
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