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Wileys Eric Swanson Announces International STM Publishing Community's Support of AGORA at FAO Launch
Hoboken, NJ, October 14, 2003 — Eric Swanson, Senior Vice President, Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishing, John Wiley & Sons, and Chairman of the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (www.stm-assoc.org), today helped to herald the inauguration of AGORA (www.aginternetwork.org), a collaboration among international scientific publishers, UN agencies, and other private and public sector organizations, united in the mission to bring essential agricultural information to the world's poorest countries.
Speaking today at the launch of AGORA in Rome, Mr. Swanson lauded the initiative's goal of increasing the quality and effectiveness of agricultural education, research and training in developing nations, through the provision of free or low cost access to more than 400 online journals in the fields of agriculture, biology, and related environmental and social sciences.
Mr. Swanson emphasized the real and substantial impact the initiative will have for the people of those nations to be served by AGORA. "AGORA will make a world of difference to the tens of thousands of students in developing nations who need to access current research information to advance their studies. It will benefit researchers and academics, opening new pathways for research, publication, and funding information. And in the long term, it will benefit local communities with better agricultural practices and knowledge. In satiating a hunger for knowledge and information, we hope to take a step towards building a world without hunger in its more literal sense."
Highlighting the role that international publishers are playing in the initiative, Mr. Swanson said that AGORA is another example of the commitment that publishers are prepared to put into making electronic primary research journal material available to the world's poorest nations, and cited the success of HINARI (www.healthinternetwork.org) as another productive public-private partnership.
The HINARI initiative, launched in 2001 in conjunction with the World Health Organization, now provides online access free or at nominal cost to more than 2,200 journals from 42 publishers, to more than 1,000 institutions located in approximately 100 of the world's lowest income countries.
"HINARI and AGORA are significant as they provide testament to the fact that public and private sectors can work together to battle inequalities between the rich and poor nations of the world. In addition to helping to wage the wars against illness and hunger, HINARI and AGORA help to bridge the digital divide between rich and poor nations. Hopefully, the provision of content by publishers may also catalyze other initiatives to improve training and technological infrastructure in these areas," said Mr. Swanson.
Anton Mangstl, Director of the FAO's Library and Documentation Systems Division, stated, "the AGORA initiative is a promising example of the International Alliance Against Hunger in action. By bringing together bilateral agencies, UN agencies, private foundations and international scientific publishers, it demonstrates that the public and private sectors can work together to build greater momentum towards building a world without hunger."
Mr. Swanson said that the AGORA initiative was made possible by the passion and commitment of a number of individuals and organizations. He recognized Maurice Long of the British Medical Journal Publishing Group for his efforts in organizing all of the founding publishers involved in the effort, and thanked Cornell University's Mann Library and Yale University Library for their technical expertise, and The Rockefeller Foundation, the FAO and the WHO for showing that public/private partnerships that benefit tens of thousands of researchers and healthcare workers can work.
Of Wiley's involvement in the initiative Mr. Swanson said that "there can be few things more satisfying to a scientific publisher than to contribute to a practical program to make valuable information easily available in places where it will be used to help people in need."
While recognizing AGORA and HINAI as important steps in bridging the digital divide, Mr. Swanson urged all sectors of the information industry to take up the baton and mobilize global science and technology to find other ways to help improve health, nutrition, and education for the world's poor.
Download the full text of Mr. Swanson's remarks at the launch of the AGORA initiative.
About Wiley
Founded in 1807, Wiley provides must-have content and services to customers worldwide. Its core businesses include scientific, technical and medical journals, encyclopedias, books and other online products and services, professional and consumer books and subscription services, and education materials for undergraduate and graduate students and lifelong learners. Wiley has publishing, marketing and distribution centers in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia and Australia. The company is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbols JWa and JWb. Wiley's Internet site can be accessed at http://www.wiley.com.
The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers
STM is a global organization of over 100 scholarly and professional publishers specialized in scientific, technical, and medical works. STM's membership includes both for-profit and not-for-profit publishers from North and Latin America, Asia, Australia, and Europe. Founded in 1968, STM has its headquarters in The Hague, The Netherlands. Their website can be found at http://www.stm-assoc.org.
About AGORA
The long-term goal of the AGORA program is to increase the quality and effectiveness of agricultural research and training in low-income countries, and in turn, to improve food security. To contribute to achieving this goal, AGORA will provide access over the world-wide-web to a research level collection of key journals in agriculture and related biological, environmental and social sciences to the poorest countries in the world. It will offer to researchers, policy-makers, educators, students, technical workers and extension specialists, a collection of literature comparable to that available to their counterparts in the developed world. For more information, visit www.aginternetwork.org , or contact the AGORA program team at AGORA@fao.org.
AGORA Content
FAO and its partners will initially work with a small number of the major international STM publishers to establish a core collection of several hundred journals in agriculture and related biological, environmental and social sciences. Founding publishers for AGORA are Blackwell Publishing, CABI, Elsevier, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press, Springer Verlag and John Wiley & Sons. Additional publishers will be approached to contribute content, including other commercial publishers, learned societies, governmental and international organizations.
