WoW! Wouter on the Web

In Norway they have build a national digital health library. And what is really special about it, everybody in Norway, I mean everybody with internet access, is allowed to read, browse and download all medical journals. It is based on the national contracts for higher education and with a small additional fee to cover the national access.

Think about it. If all higher education institutions cover the main costs already and there is not much of an additional market to be expected, why not. If in the Netherlands for instance a publisher of scientific journals has already contracts with the universities and research universities, than there is not much of a market left, so why not open up access to the IP range of the whole country.

It takes some courage to develop and implement such a model.

I was much impressed by the fact that they managed to do this. As information junkie I dwell on this idea.

Kjell also showed the implementation of the portal to host all these journals and databases and it was interesting to see that they used the federated search and clustering engine of Vivisimo.

If I now had only a Norwegian proxy server to my availability.