VHL News Network

Study highlights SciELO and J-Stage as Open Access journal platforms

The January 2009 issue of the Journal of the Medical Library Association brought a study on the distribution of open access (OA) publications in the biomedical field, based on articles indexed in the PubMED, in 2005, when 26% were available in OA. The five countries identified as having the highest number of articles in OA were Belgium, India, Canada, Brazil and Australia. The study took into account six types of OA publication. Among the web journal platforms, the SciELO, from Brazil, stood out with 85% of articles in OA, and the J-Stage, from Japan, with 40.8%
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PAHO technical cooperation in Brazil will strengthen information and knowledge management

The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO/WHO), aligned with the Health Agenda for the Americas, the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) and with its Strategic Plan for 2008-2017, has strengthened information management and knowledge exchange in the implementation of the technical cooperation program with Brazil. The PAHO Representative in Brazil, with the collaboration of the BIREME/PAHO/WHO, progressively adopts the model and operational aspects of the Virtual Health Library (VHL) in cooperation projects to enhance the capacity of access to and publication of information
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Study addresses economic implications of alternative academic publication models

A study supported by the Joint Information System Committee - JISC, from the United Kingdom, makes a detailed analysis of the costs and benefits of three alternative models of scientific publication: the classic model based on subscriptions and two contemporary models based on open access (OA) publication, either as journals fully available in OA (gold road) or with articles provided in repositories (green road). The discussion on the policy of each case contributes to better understand the political, institutional and economic implications in the application of and transition to models
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Latin America Virtual Library (L@VL - BV@L) is launched for the benefit of regional integration

On February 13, 2009, the Latin America Virtual Library - L@VL (BV@L) was launched in Sao Paulo. The initiative is coordinated by the Fundação Memorial da América Latina and aims to promote dissemination of quality information and regional integration at cultural, political, economic and social levels. The L@VL (BV@L) provides collections of sources of information that are organized, produced and intermediated by the Memorial and the Latin American Library Victor Civita. In its operation, the VHL model is adopted, with the support of the FAPESP and collaboration of the BIREME/PAHO/WHO
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Blogs firmly established as means of scientific communication

The Web logs or blogs have been progressively used by institutions and reference scientific journals to communicate ideas among scientists and the general public. As a mean of publication that is fast, informal, full of services and with a potential to reach a large number of readers, the blogs are getting more credibility to scientific communication as a complement to journals. In addition to cataloguing health science blogs, the BIREME/PAHO/WHO promotes the use of blogs within the context of the VHL and associated networks to expand the means of scientific and technical communication on health
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Mobile phones expands access to health

Mobile phone is the technology that more rapidly grows in Latin America and the Caribbean: millions of people are connecting to each other through radio waves and changing forever their economic, social and political condition. Its huge potential to facilitate and expand access to health encourages global and regional initiatives, and it particularly represents an innovation path for the VHL to democratize access to scientific and technical information. The BIREME/PAHO/WHO has been testing technologies to operate information services for mobile devices
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