The last two decades have witnessed an unprecedented rise in the subscription prices of scientific and technical journals, at a pace far higher than the general inflation rate. Even libraries in rich universities in the advanced countries have felt the pinch and have to cut down on the number of journals they subscribe to. Universities ad research institutions in the developing world have felt it even more. As research depends on having access to the literature of science, escalation of journal subscription costs hampers production of new knowledge. It is becoming increasingly difficult for scientists in developing countries to keep pace with developments in science and it is becoming impossible for them to be able to perform as well as their counterparts in the advanced countries. Thanks to advances in technology, and in particular the Internet and the World Wide Web, it is now possible for making the field of information access level playing. Physicists around the world are using these technologies to great advantage. While they publish their papers in peer-reviewed journals they also place them in ‘arXiv’ the central repository of full text papers, both preprints and post-prints, making the papers available to anyone with an Internet connection. The value of such repositories, both central and distributed (or institutional) has been well documented. But most institutions and individual scientists in the developing world are not taking advantage of these developments. There have been many initiatives in the West, on both sides of the Atlantic, that are facilitating the growth of the open access movement, and developing countries run the risk of being left behind.

It is against this background that the Indian Academy of Sciences, the Indian Institute of Science and the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation have come forward to hold a two-day workshop on electronic publishing and open access: developing country perspectives. They have long been interested in bringing together policymakers of the three leading developing countries of the world, viz. China, India and Brazil, with a view to discussing and evolving a common developing world strategy for open access. If these three Third World giants adopt open access in a big way, it will give a great boost to the OA movement not only in the rest of the developing countries but in the entire world.