Researchers and research interests in developing countries are underrepresented in mainstream academic publishing systems. Reasons are many but publishing costs, research infrastructure financing and interest in topics are among the most apparent. Some of the consequences of this landscape are:

• Difficult access to international scientific production
• Invisibility of research
• Underrepresentation of development topics
• Invisibility of researcher
• Difficult access to mainstream publishing circuits
• Difficulty to build one’s scientific network
• Actuality of findings

Efforts have been made to mitigate this situation; an increasingly common and successful approach is open access to scholarly literature such as open access journals, self-archiving in corporate repositories and self-publishing — most of them, as can be seen, at the institutional level. But the concept and tools around the web 2.0 harness clear opportunities for researchers, acting as individuals, to contribute and build a broader personal presence on the Internet, at the same time benefiting from a better diffusion for their work, interests and publications.

Complementary to formal academic research dissemination and validation trajectories, and complementary to these institutional initiatives, the Personal Research Portal — a mesh of Web 2.0 applications like blogs, wikis and the like — should be able to contribute to achieve the following goals:

At the Personal / Researcher level, let the scientific community know:

• “who am I”
• “what do I do / what does interest me”
• “what have I done / what do I know”
• “where am I”

At the Work / Research level:

• Constitute a public repository for personal production, with past and present information and documentation, with everything interlinked
• Gather digital resources, news, general information and materials, on the same platform, accessible from each and every computer
• Self-archive & self-publish research results, ongoing research, reflections, doubts, findings
• Let know what one knows and that one knows
• Disclose and foster formal and informal relationships with the academic community

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The concept of the Personal Research Portal will be discussed with professor Ismael Peña-López, Open University of Catalonia (Spain), during the Web2fordev Conference. His work in this topic has been recently published at the Knowledge Management for Development Journal, where a full article is free to download.

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