PRESS RELEASE: London, 23 July 2001

The announcement was made at a global videoconference on Universal Access to
Health Information staged at the British Medical Association in London,
chaired by Richard Smith, Editor of the British Medical Journal, and with
live links to development professionals throughout the world.

Describing the announcement, Chris Zielinski, Chief Executive of Informania
Ltd., said, "For all the perceived evils of globalization, the global spread
of valid health information can be an unalloyed good, and I commend the
initiative of WHO and the commercial publishers." However, he warned, "If
all this information comes from the industrialized countries alone, and none
of it is local, it could end up being seen as a form of information
colonisation."

The provision of ExtraMED - which has exclusive electronic rights to over
300 of the leading biomedical journals published in developing countries,
and has been issuing them on monthly CD-ROMs over the last few years - would
help to balance the equation.

"It is crucial that information from the South is included in this worthy
initiative, as an act of validation and in pursuit of information equity,"
Zielinski said.

Informania Ltd aimed to develop the distribution mechanism for ExtraMED in
association with a well-known publisher, to coincide with the launch of the
major medical publishers' scheme in early 2002. He offered the use of the
recently established Information Waystations and Staging Posts Network
(www.iwsp.org) to distribute the publishers' offline material, as it already
links the largest collection of health information centres in the developing
world, and is set to expand rapidly.

Zielinski also called upon other electronic publishers of developing country
content to join the initiative. "We could have a comprehensive offering,
amounting to an alternative MEDLINE - providing the full text of all the
leading developing country journals from a single source."

CONTACT: Chris Zielinski, Chief Executive, Informania Limited, P.O. Box 40,
Petersfield, Hants GU32 2YH, UK Tel: +44-(0)1730-301297 Fax:
0044-1730-265398 e-mail: [email protected]
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BACKGROUND:

ExtraMED publishes the full text of 316 Third World biomedical journals as
page images (print-outs look like photocopies of the actual journal pages).
Some 30,000 articles, comprising 250,000 pages, had been included in
ExtraMED by July 2000. Taking its name from the fact that it comprises
journals that are 'extra' to the MEDLINE database, ExtraMED focuses on
journals that are largely excluded from the international indexes. The
journals were originally selected through the World Health Organization's
regional Index Medicus projects. It is by far the largest full-text source
of such literature. The journals benefit from wider exposure and a share of
any income generated.

ExtraMED was started by Chris Zielinski in 1994 while he was a Director of
Health and Biomedical Information at the World Health Organization. Chris
continued the project within his family company, Informania Ltd.

Information about the Information Waystations and Staging Posts Network is
available at www.iwsp.org.

On 9 July 2001, six of the world's leading medical publishers (Blackwell
Science, Elsevier Science, Harcourt International, John Wiley, Springer
Verlag, and Wolters Kluwer) joined forces with WHO in a unique venture in
which they have put profits aside to enable more than 100 of the poorest
countries in the world to access vital scientific information free of charge
through the Internet.

['HIF-net at WHO' profile: Chris Zielinski spent over 20 years as a
publisher in WHO and FAO, working in Africa, Asia and Europe. Chris is
Principal Consultant of Informania Ltd, the company he originally founded in
1992 to produce ExtraMED, a database which presents the full text and images
of over 300 Third World biomedical journals on a monthly CD-ROM. He is
currently Director of the Health Information for Development Project, the
projected first phase of the Information Waystations and Staging Posts
project, which seeks to build the technological capacity of some 1,000
health information resource centres and develop selected centres into
large-scale producers of locally appropriate health information. Chris
serves on the boards of Healthlink Worldwide, and Partnerships for Health
Information. ]