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Libraries and universities in the world’s 65 poorest countries will have free
Internet access to nearly a thousand top biomedical journals from January 2002.
The initiative is being brokered by the World Health Organization, the
British Medical Journal and the Soros Foundation. The world’s six biggest
medical journal publishers, including Elsevier Science and Blackwell, have also
pledged to provide access at “deeply reduced rates” to other developing
countries. This is “perhaps the biggest step ever taken towards reducing the
health information gap between rich and poor countries”, says WHO
director-general Gro Harlem Brundtland.