Science in the South

Posted by tomo at 12:50 PM in science .

There's a great inequity in the amount of scientific output as measured in numbers of articles published between developed and developing nations, which is a serious problem according to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in this PLoS Biology open access journal article. Richer countries have more money to spend on research but the money spent in developing regions such as South America are resulting in more output for the money, but "Albornoz (2001) concluded that, as a group, Latin America could afford to invest a much higher proportion of its resources in scientific research and development." At the same time, the output per dollar in the US is dropping and so if I were to come upon a large sum of cash I would invest it on research grants and awards in Latin America. The issue of cross-polination via the attendance of international conferences is mentioned and developing countries might do better by hosting conferences in their own countries, not just because it's cheap there, but because it's becoming more difficult to get into the US for conferences.