“Knowledge is power,” World Bank Group President Robert B. Zoellick said last week, commenting on the World Bank’s new Open Access policy. “Making our knowledge widely and readily available will empower others to come up with solutions to the world’s toughest problems.”
Indeed, the Bank’s new Open Access policy builds on recent efforts to increase access to information and to data at the World Bank and to make its research and knowledge products as widely available as possible. As the first phase of this policy, on April 10th, the Bank launched a new Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) and adopted a set of Creative Commons copyright licenses. As a result, anyone can read, download, and reuse the Bank’s work free of charge, provided that work is published by the Bank. If the Bank’s research is published by an external publisher, the final word-processed version of the manuscript is deposited in the OKR upon acceptance by the external publisher and will be immediately available to Bank staff. The work will be available to the public after the external publisher’s embargo. We expect that the length of publisher embargoes will decline over time.
What this means in practice is that the new policy will improve access to those who regularly use World Bank research and knowledge products and will increase the range of people who can now access Bank content—from journalists and students to civil society organizations (CSOs) and the general public.
Members of Business Fights Poverty, including those of you who study, write about, and need to stay abreast of some of the key research at the intersection of business and development, might be interested in perusing the new OKR for the more recent reports focusing on the role of the private sector.
The following three reports are examples of what you might find, all of which is now easily accessed and downloadable (free of charge) from the OKR:
There are many more research articles and knowledge products available to the public via the OKR. We invite you leverage the functionality of the OKR by using the Browse and Advanced Search functions to find reports specifically related to your interests.
Mr. Rossel, a native of Santiago, Chile, is the World Bank Group Publisher and has over 25 years of experience in international professional and scholarly publishing. To support the institution’s role as supplier of global knowledge, the Office of the Publisher works with departments across the institution to develop and publish a range of products that cover the full spectrum of economic and social development to decision-makers, academia, general audiences, and other constituencies. Prior to assuming his current position, Mr. Rossel was Operations and Marketing Manager for the World Bank’s Office of the Publisher.
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