A poor country student will submit a request for a paper to a group of ‘volunteer’ students in the developed world-the list can be put on a database. The rich country student picks from the list the journal article and emails it to the poor country student. Simple as that.
I think it would be more effective than many of the ‘fads’ that are suggested- things like let us connect the whole of Africa to the internet. Schools and universities often cannot just afford to subscribe to decent databases of journals.
Are we violating copyright? May be. Anybody who’s interested in creating this NGO, leave a comment below.
1 comment:
Huh... I just lost access to JStor, a few months ago, because I graduated, and I know how it feels.
What you want to do is to get some sort of discount or subsidy for institutions in poorer countries to services like ScienceDirect or JStor. Otherwise you'll need A LOT of volunteers.
NBER will send me papers for free if I can confirm a .ro email address. (I can!)
Actually, if I'm allowed to go off-topic a bit, as a student from Romania, I felt that my education was constrained most, in order of priority, by:
1) Lack of discussion peers;
2) Lack of competent (at international level) teachers;
3) My own laziness;
4) Access to materials.
It's hard to learn when you're sort of alone at it and when your teachers are still stuck in the '60s. :-(
These days you can get, off DC++ and other file sharing software, most undergraduate and graduate textbooks. That's a good baseline. If you know English, you're set.
What I think would help us most, from US students, is counseling, correspondence and Internet-based cooperation on real projects. Access to contemporary papers is a close second, though.
Anyway, if you're serious about this, I think you could install a issue tracking software and have poor students create "service calls" and volunteers servicing them, most of it on a semi-anonymous basis.
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