This slideshow is a brief presentation for a class that I am auditing this semester at SFU, Communication in Development, co-taught by Bob Anderson and James Busumtwi-Sam.
In brief, there are tremendous resources available to scholars and educators in the developing world, including more than 4,000 fully open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journals, over 32 million free publications, and major YouTube courseware suites produced by prestigious universities such as the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science and MIT.
Developing countries are leaders as well as beneficiaries in the open access and open education movements. The Latin American countries are leaders in the open access journals movement with the Scielo project. Africa has a pan-continental journals portal called African Journals Online. South Africa is a leader in the open educational movement, India in national open access policy development.
Resources and supports for developing countries are discussed. Two approaches to sharing knowledge are presented. One is described as a charity model, involving northern countries sharing access to journals in a limited way. The other model, open access, involves sharing by all; OA is seen as a superior model as the means to equity on a global scale.
Students with an interest in open access: this is a wonderful and fun way to introduce classmates and faculty alike to open access. As a bonus, it is easy to find creative commons licensed content to include in your presentation.
