Many congratulations to EIFL for its outstanding work and for winning the SPARC 6th award!

EIFL Open Access programme wins sixth SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications

The EIFL Open Access (OA) programme has been chosen as the winner of the 2011 SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications for its awareness raising, advocacy and capacity building activities over the last three years, and for its success in developing a large number of repositories and open access journals in EIFL partner countries.

“With the sixth Award, SPARC Europe wishes to encourage the EIFL Open Access programme to continue its excellent work and to provide inspiration to other organizations with EIFL's approach and activities. SPARC Europe believes the EIFL Open Access programme sets a perfect example for others who aim to take up advocacy work and run activities to further the open access movement”, said Drs Astrid van Wesenbeeck, Executive Director, SPARC Europe.

“It is a great honour for EIFL to receive the sixth SPARC Europe Award. We embraced the open access movement from the beginning when we signed on to the Budapest Open Access Initiative a decade ago. It is gratifying that our efforts have been recognized by the international community. We are fortunate to have Iryna Kuchma, a passionate open access advocate, managing the EIFL-OA Programme,” said Rima Kupryte, EIFL Director. “We are also grateful to the Open Society Foundation Information Program who have supported our work on open access throughout this time.”

Over the last three years, EIFL-OA has organized over 40 awareness raising and training events with participants from over 50 countries, and has advocated nationally and internationally for OA policies and mandates by institutions and governments. EIFL partner countries in Europe now boast over 210 open access repositories and more than 2,340 OA journals, ten higher education institutions have newly adopted open access mandates, and hundreds of library professionals, scholars, educators and students have been empowered to become open access advocates.

 

“I would like to thank SPARC Europe for this award that recognizes the achievements of EIFL and our partner countries. I would also like to thank the network of EIFL-OA country coordinators and the many experts who have contributed greatly to the success of the programme,” said Iryna Kuchma, EIFL Open Access programme manager. “Without their hard work and commitment, we would not have been able to achieve these impressive results.”

  

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