Human curiosity about the laws that govern the natural world and the application of those laws to supporting humanity’s survival and prosperity cuts across our social and political boundaries. Throughout history, via trade routes, diplomatic missions, emigration, and planned academic exchanges, the sharing of scientific knowledge has provided mutual benefits to societies and formed sustained bonds between them.

The role of science, therefore, as a bridge between cultures is likely as old as the human species itself. In the 21st century, however, the relative ease of physical travel and the light-speed rapidity of communication can allow scientific exchange to occur much more readily than at any time in the past. And yet, the tools that are available to support this exchange are often only partly developed in many countries and have not had the impact that they should.

This discussion paper proposes several steps by which access to international research publications and the dissemination of a country’s research results can be improved through a well-designed and well-implemented program to create virtual science libraries that server national science and engineering communities. The discussion is illustrated with examples from the Iraq Virtual Science Library that the U.S. Civilian Research & Development Foundation has developed since inception in 2007 and successfully handed off to be sustained and expanded by the Government of Iraq in 2010.

The first challenge of establishing a national virtual science library is determining the appropriate content for the community of researchers. Most developing countries have access to more than 7,000 journal titles through three programs organized under the auspices of the United Nations in 2002 (OARE for environmental sciences, AGORA for agricultural sciences, and HINARI for health sciences). However, this journal set does not include the majority of the most frequently cited journals in several critical fields of research (Figure 1). On average, 70% of the top journals are not available through the three programs that most commonly serve the needs for knowledge access in more than one hundred countries. To address this fundamental problem, CRDF’s virtual science library program works with publishers to open access at the national level to almost all available research journals, including the top journals in each field. Following this open access period, the program then identifies through stakeholder meetings and usage statistics the supplementary coverage required to fully meet the needs of the national research community and liberate them from a de facto intellectual ghetto. In the case of the Iraq Virtual Science library, the program has supplemented the UN program journals with an additional 4,000 journal titles that provide the complete coverage needed by the more than 8,000 researchers actively using the system.

The second challenge in establishing a national virtual science library system is in making sure the system is accessible and usable. In the case of the Iraq Virtual Science Library, CRDF has designed a system with federated search capacities that allows users to search across journal databases without having to know in advance which publisher website contains the journal article they seek. CRDF has also organized events to train the trainers, and we observed an inflection point in the growth of usage following each training. More than twenty-five universities and research institutions with more than 8,000 total users access the system, and to date they have downloaded more than one million journal articles and tripled the rate of Iraq’s research publication.

The articles being published by researchers in Iraq almost all contain citations to articles that are available through the Iraq Virtual Science Library.

The final challenge in establishing a national virtual science library is to assure its sustainability. The CRDF digital library programs are designed to be operated and coordinated at the national level, with CRDF serving as a neutral implementation support agency that designs and executes a hand-off to assure that the program is sustained through government funding and operation. CRDF is providing training in publisher negotiations for the Iraq Virtual Science Library and will sit at the table with the Government of Iraq and journal publishers to secure five-year agreements for journal access. Five different ministries within Iraq are contributing to the ongoing costs of supporting the IVSL subscriptions, and Iraq is now one of the few nations that will adequately provide for journal access for its entire research community.

In 2010, CRDF will work to replicate this successful national virtual science library model in Afghanistan, Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. We propose to extend this model to additional countries in the next five years to provide the knowledge infrastructure needed for researchers to collaborate across cultures. The costs are nominal in the context of most nation’s science and technology budgets. CRDF can, with funding for its setup and development in each country, propagate this capacity to exchange knowledge and build bridges globally