Donating books and journals to less developed countries

Both the BMA and the BMJ receive many requests for free medical books and journals from doctors and librarians in less developed countries and other areas of need. Until recently we have had no specific funding to meet these requests, and have arranged donations of secondhand journals and surplus BMJ books somewhat haphazardly. Since 2000, however, the BMA and BMJ have set aside £30 000 ($47 000; €47  000) a year, from the profits of the BMJ Publishing Group, to help institutions to choose the right health information for their users (see BMA/BMJ information fund's activity report for 2000-2 on bmj.com).

The BMA/BMJ information fund does not give money but donates and sends educational materials. And because we want our donations to help as many people as possible we consider applications only from institutions rather than from individual doctors and other health workers. We ask applicants to tell us about their organisations: what they do, what other support they receive, and exactly what materials they need. In this way we can ensure, as far as possible, that the information is relevant and of high quality. The fund can provide books, journals, and CD Roms from the BMJ Publishing Group at very low cost, but it can also donate other publishers' material at discounted prices, bought through the BMJ Bookshop.

The fund does not have a distribution network. We arrange and pay for postage of consignments and always ask applicants for advice on the best way to send them. In this way we have provided books requested by medical centres and libraries in Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Gambia, Somaliland, Uganda, Nigeria, Iraq, Bangladesh, India, and Nepal. But we realised early on that supporting existing distributors would be a good way to use at least part of the money. That's why we have worked closely with a British charity, Book Aid International. Book Aid has already distributed across sub-Saharan Africa 3500 copies of the newly revised ABC of AIDS, which the fund paid for as a special print run.¹ A similar scheme is now under way for the new BMJ book International Child Health. In addition, the fund has allowed Book Aid to come to the BMJ warehouse and choose a variety of books to send to their extensive network of needy organisations.

Although the information fund is primarily for organisations in poorer countries, we have also donated requested books to two centres in the United Kingdom. Both help refugee doctors prepare for the United Kingdom's Professional and Linguistic Assessment Board (PLAB) test, a cause that the fund is happy to support.

We haven't been able to say yes to everyone. We couldn't fund some applications, either because we were unable to gather sufficient information about the institutions concerned or because the projects they described were too far removed from our terms of reference. We have also turned down requests from individuals, although we have directed them to a scheme that matches them with BMJ readers who want to donate their used journals and books directly.²

The BMA/BMJ information fund is one of several initiatives to plug the information gap between rich and poor countries. The BMJ and studentBMJ are freely available on the web to everybody worldwide. And more than 100 of the world's poorest countries now have free web access to the electronic versions of the BMJ Publishing Group's 23 specialist journals and its evidence based compendium Clinical Evidence.³ Many other publishers offer similar web access to well over 1000 of the world's best biomedical journals, either directly or through schemes such as FreeMedicalJournals.com (www.freemedicaljournals.com) and the Health InterNetwork: Access to Research Initiative (HINARI).⁴

These schemes will be of limited usefulness, however, if the information they provide isn't relevant to the people who need to use it in their learning and practice.⁵,⁶ The BMA/BMJ information fund is trying to get round this by donating exactly what people tell us they want. If you would like to apply to the fund on behalf of a medical school, library, hospital, health centre, or medical association in an area of great need, please email us a detailed request, using the application form on bmj.com.