Abstract
Open access has seen a great many developments since its inception some twenty five years ago. From an individual initiative it evolved into an institutional then a governmental action that gave it more weight. These initiatives that took place in the last decade of the twentieth century, and are still going on, have coincided with a revolution that has impacted our daily lives and more precisely our lives as researchers: the Internet which changed our ways of doing scientific research and whose influence could be seen live under our own eyes. While open access in the developed world has thrived, in the developing world to which Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia belong it seems to lag behind. As an example of this, the three countries have together only fifteen and thirteen open repositories in The Directory of Open Access Repositories (DOAR) and The Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) respectively. Beside this quantitative weakness, these open repositories do not seem to implement a clear open access policy as most of them do restrict access to registered users with an account and a password which contravenes the most primary open access philosophy allowing access to scientific literature pending only an Internet connection. Additionally, previous studies have shown that the most basic open access concepts seem to be misconstrued by those in charge for a national open access policy. In consequence, this has impacted negatively on the performance of these open repositories and the ratio of its open access literature. It is suggested that bigger importance and means be given to the question by the people in charge. Cooperative projects such as ISTeMAG should be encouraged and should be the basis of a sound open access policy and allow these countries to attain the much coveted title of The Information Society.
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