Building Surgical Research Capacity in Africa: The Ptolemy Project

T he Ptolemy Project (http:/ www.ptolemy.ca) is a recently developed model of electronic access to medical literature for surgeons in developing countries. The program provides for East African surgeons to become research affi liates of the University of Toronto and have access to the full text resources of the university library, via a secure system that monitors and evaluates their usage [1]. The project started in 2001, and the benefi ciaries of the project so far are 201 doctors, mostly belonging to the Association of Surgeons of East Africa (Figure 1) and the College of Surgeons of East, Central, and Southern Africa (COSECSA). In this article, we describe an international collaboration program between the University of Toronto and East African surgical communities through the Ptolemy Project. Research is unthinkable without access to scientifi c literature. The Ptolemy Project attempts to bridge the gap between the literature available to researchers in wealthy developed countries and that available to researchers in developing countries, where researchers are largely deprived of access to essential health information. The project's aim is to improve access for developing country researchers to peer-reviewed medical literature, as well as to journals and documents originating in their part of the world. The Ptolemy Project is an electronic health information access tool designed to be effective, to be easy to use, and to satisfy the need for health information of surgeons in the developing world (K. Burton, A. Howard, M. Beveridge, unpublished data). Health has improved in developing countries more rapidly over the last half century than it did in Western countries from the 17th century onwards [2]. The chief reason has been advances in technology and not, as many believe, improvement in income or education [2]. Technological advances take many forms: examples include vaccines against childhood diseases, effective short-term treatment of tuberculosis, and better information on the risks and control of diseases such as HIV/ AIDS and tobacco-related illnesses. None of the advances would have been possible without high-quality scientifi c research. Yet despite the promise of knowledge to reduce premature mortality and poverty, only 10% of the world's health research resources go towards the 90% of diseases that burden the poorest countries [3]. Making any serious improvement in mortality, morbidity, and disability among the global poor will require more locally driven collaborative research and wider usage of the scientifi c literature [4]. The fundamental idea underlying Ptolemy is that …