It is gratifying, as staff at Nature have found, to meet researchers in infectious diseases in the world's poorer nations and discover that they are making use of their privileged access to our content. Since March 2002, researchers, policy-makers, educators and others in more than 1,000 institutions in 100 or so developing countries have been receiving Nature free of charge online as part of the Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI).

Led by the World Health Organization, this United Nations initiative includes all of the journals published by Nature Publishing Group (NPG), and 2,000 or more from other publishers (for details see http://www.healthinternetwork.org/src/eligibility.php). Web statistics show that significant and increasing use is being made of this accessibility, for which the HINARI secretariat acts as gatekeeper. It includes all countries whose annual GNP per head is less than US$3,000. (Publishers may charge reduced prices for access in the less impoverished of these countries, but NPG has elected to provide free access for all.)

An equivalent scheme for researchers in agriculture was launched on 14 October by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Inevitably, it has an acronym: AGORA (Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture) — see http://www.aginternetwork.org/en/about.php. As with HINARI in its first phase, all publishers sign up to providing free access to researchers and others in countries where the GNP is less than $1,000 per capita (there are 69 eligible countries — see http://www.who.int/library/reference/temp/eligible_countries.pdf).

It is worth adding that Nature actively supports another free-access distributor of its content that is targeting the developing world: SciDev.Net (see http://www.SciDev.Net), financed by foundations and government departments for international development.

We at Nature are delighted to contribute to the principal goal of AGORA: to increase the quality and effectiveness of agricultural research and training in low-income countries, and thereby to improve food security.