HINARI is the Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative. It was set up by the World Health Organization and major publishers to enable developing countries to access collections of biomedical and health literature. There are over 7000 journal titles available to health institutions in 109 countries. HINARI is part of Research4Life, the collective name for four programs - HINARI (focusing on health), AGORA (focusing on agriculture), OARE (focusing on environment), and ARDI (focusing on applied science and technology). Together, Research4Life provides developing countries with free or low cost access to academic and professional peer-reviewed content online.
The HINARI program, and the other programs, have recently been reviewed and the publishers involved have committed to continuing with it until at least 2015.
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The HINARI project began in January 2002 with around 1,500 journals from six major publishers: Blackwell Publishing, Elsevier, the Harcourt, Wolters Kluwer, Springer Science+Business Media, and John Wiley & Sons. HighWire Press also participates in HINARI.
Eligible categories of institutions are: national universities, research institutes, professional schools (medicine, nursing, pharmacy, public health, dentistry), teaching hospitals, government offices and national medical libraries. All staff members and students are entitled to access to the journals.[1]
The country lists are based on three factors: Gross National Income (GNI; World Bank figures), United Nations Least Developed Country List, and Human Development Index (HDI). Institutions in countries with at least one of the following criteria may be eligible for free access: inclusion in the LDCs, an HDI of less than 0.63, or per capita GNI at or below $1600. Institutions in other countries with either a per capita GNI less than $5000 or HDI at or below 0.67 may be eligible to pay a fee of $1000 per year.[1]
Some large, emerging countries including India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and China are excluded by most publishers as these markets represent important parts of many publishers' business plans.[2][3]