Archives for Latin America

A new Royal Society of Chemistry initiative will give scientists in a group of Latin American countries free access to its journals archive.

The offer to selected developing nations in Central and South America comes nine months after the RSC launched a widely-welcomed Archives for Africa initiative by which scientists on that continent would be able to reach journals in its archive electronically without paying a fee.

The nations where scientists will have similar access through the newly-created Archives for Latin America scheme are:

• El Salvador
• Cuba
• Guatemala
• Haiti
• Honduras
• Nicaragua
• Dominican Republic
• Peru
• Surinam
• Ecuador
• Paraguay
• Colombia
• Bolivia
• French Guiana
• Guyana 

The RSC, one of the world's major publishers in its field, believes that it has a duty to share knowledge with colleagues in less well-developed nations in order to advance the chemical sciences internationally.

Professor Jim Feast, RSC President, said this week: "We in the UK are fortunate in having a highly sophisticated science infrastructure paralleled by an equally impressive publishing industry; it can only be ethical and proper to support colleagues in other, less privileged, regions to address their own local problems and challenges."

Professor Feast, of Durham University added: "Chemistry papers both new and old can be of tremendous help to scientists and we are pleased that chemical scientists in these 15 countries will be able to access papers from 1841-2004."   

Prof Christian Blanco of Universidad Industrial de Santander, Chile said today: "We are deeply impressed as we constantly reference articles from RSC journals and we will now be able to access them all at source."