BMJ  2003;327 (4 October), doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7418.0-e

Global coalition builds research capacity in Africa

An innovative global partnership is helping build up medical research in Africa. The Ptolemy project, named after the general who built the great library in Alexandria housing the written corpus of the ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds, makes surgeons in East Africa research affiliates to the University of Toronto. Beveridge and colleagues (p 790) describe their development of the project, in which African scholars are granted access to the full-text resources of the university and become members of an electronic research community. Even though Ptolemy is a small project, it has the potential to be widely reproduced, say the authors.

Credit: JEAN-MARC BOUJU/AP

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BMJ 2003 327: 790-793. [Full Text] [PDF]