EPT

Berlin 10 OA Conference to be in Africa for the first time

2012-01-27T02:06:00.000-08:00

From Ina Smith, runner-up of the EPT OA Award and Repository Manager of the University of Stellenbosch (SUNScholar):

**** First Announcement ****
Berlin 10 Open Access Conference to be held in Stellenbosch, South Africa

Stellenbosch University, in partnership with the Max Planck Society and the
Academy of Science for South Africa, has the pleasure of announcing that the
prestigious Berlin 10 Open Access Conference will be held in Stellenbosch,
South Africa. This will be the first time that the Berlin Open Access
Conference will be held in Africa. As is tradition with the conference, it
will explore the transformative impact that open, online access to research
can have on scholarship, scientific discovery, and the translation of
results to the benefit of the public.
The Conference will be held at the Wallenberg Research Centre, Stellenbosch
Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS). STIAS is situated on the historic
Mostertsdrift farm in the heart of Stellenbosch.

Conference date: 7-8 November 2012

Pre-conference date: 6 November 2012

The theme, programme, speakers and other relevant information will become
available in forthcoming announcements which will also be available on the
conference website (www.berlin10.org).
*************************

Ina Smith

E-Research Repository Manager (SUNScholar) | Library and Information Service
| University of Stellenbosch | Private Bag X5036, 7599 | South Africa
http://scholar.sun.ac.za | http://oa.sun.ac.za | E-mail: ismith@sun.ac.za |
Tel: +27 21 808 9139 | Skype: smith.ina | Office hours: Mo-Fr: 08h00-16h30

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EPT OA Award - And the runners-up are!

2012-01-15T07:36:00.000-08:00

After highlighting the winner of EPT’s OA Award (Francis Jayakanth, India) for individuals that have made the most significant contribution to the progress of OA, we are pleased now to give wider recognition to our runners-up, who have all received Certificates in honour of their achievements. We congratulate them all and are proud to include them in our 2011 ‘OA roll of honour’.

We are very pleased to provide extended information on the work of the runners-up to the EPT OA Award. They are (in alphabetical order):

- Ina Smith, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa – manager of E-Research Repository (SunScholar) and UPSpace Institutional Repository. In 2011, Ina and her team launched SunJournals to host OA journals – a collaboration between the University Librarary and Information Service, departments and other university units. Professor Russel Botman signed the Berlin Declaration in 2010 committing the University to OA policies and practices. Ina has organised a number of IR training events in other countries and held seminars and webcasts in celebration of OA week.

- Tatyana Zayseva, Khazar University Library and Information Center (KULIC) - has promoted and educated OA options among the University faculty and has successfully established KULIC, the university IR, has explained the importance of OA to the University and to other national organisations, has developed online OA journals under a CC_BY license, has introduced e-learning technologies. Tatyana has participated in numerous international initiatives (in Russia, USA, Ukraine and Turkey). Her efforts have resulted in KUIR becoming the only IR in Azerbaijan and the Caucasus to be included in the top repositories in the world (World repository Ranking). KULIC has also been responsible for digitising back issues of university theses and dissertations. See here for local praise: http://www.khazar.org/n99/0/Head-Librarian-Receives-Honorary-Certificate.

- Xiaolin Zhang, National Science Library (NSL), Chinese Academy of Science – the NSL has been responsible for the establishment of the CAS IR Grid which harvests and aggregates metadata from IRs across the CAS Institutes; it has organised numerous workshops and seminars on all aspects of OA, including IR and OA journal management, IR policies, OA licensing and IR deposit best practices. CAS was the first Chinese institute to sign the Berlin Declaration in 2003, and the NSL provides integrated library services, including training and alert services. In 2009, NSL introduced an OA mandate requiring deposit in its IR within one month of publication; it also drafted copyright addendums and licenses, serving as a test bed for the Chinese OA Portal. OA is now firmly established in CAS Institutions.

Collectively, these individuals have become responsible for the wide dissemination of research arising from their countries’ support. This in turn advances the success of global research, since all OA material is globally available for building new developments. Recognising the importance of this as the main purpose of all research, the contrast between these efforts in the developing world and those of some publishers in the North, who are introducing measures to undermine the OA movement (see Blog posting of January 10^th 2012) is noticeable.

An attempt to block OA distribution of US published research findings - the RWA

2012-01-10T08:21:00.000-08:00

The EPT has written to a number of publishers/organisations that are signed up members of the American Association of Publishers, which supports the recently presented Research Works Act (RWA) submitted to Congress as HR3699. This Act seeks to undermine the existing open access distribution of published research, via such outlets as the NIH, and is clearly a move by the publishing industry to undermine the great advances already made towards the free and fair distribution of publicly funded research findings. The EPT has written to publishers that have existing OA policies, pointing out that the RWA act is in conflict with these policies and requesting clarification and preferably dissociation from the stance taken by the AAP.

Fur further information on the RWA, follow Peter Suber’s blog on https://plus.google.com/u/0/109377556796183035206/posts/QYAH1jSJG6L

and read other comments here (http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/867-guid.html).

Below is an example of the letters we have sent:

"We write from the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development, a long-established UK-based registered charity which works to support access to current research by the vast majority of the world’s researchers who live in low-economy countries.

The US Research Works Act currently proposed totally undermines this effort. This Act has been introduced by Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), both of whom appear to have received substantial sums of money from the publishing industry over the past few years. The Act would prevent open dissemination of publicly-funded research, undoing all the good done by the NIH open access policy and preventing the world’s disadvantaged researchers from accessing the findings from US research.

The American Association of Publishers has openly welcomed and supported the Act. Your company/organisation is a member of the AAP. As a publisher with a mission to disseminate research as widely as possible, we would expect you to dissociate yourselves, clearly and loudly, from this proposal. Support for the RWA is clearly in direct conflict with your stated policy in support of Open Access.

Open Access has been a life-line to the researchers in developing and emerging countries, their institutes and ultimately to their national economies, providing the potential for building on past research to the benefit of the global community (think infectious diseases, all public health issues, climate change, agricultural problems, energy provision, water conservation, engineering developments . . .).

The economic returns to countries from freedom of access to global research and the developments that follow from it are vastly greater than those from the small service provided by the publishing industry. The former is almost immeasurable in comparison. This Act has been driven by those that are putting commercial gain before the health and indeed survival of many of the world’s populations. This is not the purpose of public investment in research.

Yours sincerely,

The Electronic Publishing Trust for Development

Web site:http://www.epublishingtrust.org

Blog:http://www.epublishisngtrust.blogspot.com"

EPT OA AWARD 2011- announcing the winner!

2012-01-01T03:38:00.000-08:00

Press Release January 1^st 2012

INAUGURAL EPT AWARD for OPEN ACCESS

The Electronic Publishing Trust for Development is pleased to announce the winners of a new annual award to be made to individuals working in developing countries who have made a significant personal contribution to advancing the cause of open access and the free exchange of research findings.

We received 30 proposals from organisations in 17 developing countries on four continents, naming individuals who have worked hard to promote Open Access and who have achieved substantial progress. The selection of a single winner was extremely difficult as we received nominations for so many individuals who have made impressive strides by any or all of the following means:-

establishing OA institutional repositories;

setting up or encouraging conversion to OA journals;
achieving establishment of OA mandates requiring research to be OA on publication, or other policy developments;
advocating OA via seminars, publications, workshops, videos;
training others in the technology of setting up IRs;
preparing and establishing e-learning projects;
working towards the acceptance of Creative Commons licensing arrangements for research publications;
developing software for use in OA practices.

Because of the high standard of the applicants, we have decided to name a single winner, but also to recognise three other individuals who were very close runners-up. All will receive a certificate and the winner will receive in addition an engraved plaque in the next few weeks.

We are very happy to announce that the winner of the inaugural award is Dr Francis Jayakanth of the National Centre for Scientific Information, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. Dr Jayakanth played a significant role in the establishment of India’s first institutional repository (IR) (http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in). He now manages the IR and has provided technical support for establishing IRs in many other universities and institutes in India. He has been the key resource person at many events to train people in setting up IRs and OA journals. He has delivered presentations on IRs, OA journals, the OAI protocol, OAI compliance, the benefits of OA to authors and institutions and the role of libraries. He has developed a free and open source software tool (CDSOAI), which is widely used.

The Indian Institute of Science is the most prestigious institute in India and its IR now holds >31,400 records, making the century-old institute's research far more globally visible than before. The University Grants Commission in India has been impressed by the IISC’s IR and has directed all universities in India to replicate this effort.

Francis Jayakanth can indeed be considered an OA ‘renaissance man’, an advocate and technical expert in all aspect of Open Access development and an inspiration to all, both at the research and policy level.

The EPT is proud to congratulate Dr Jayakanth as our first Award winner. We believe this Award and the example of our first winner will inspire many others and lead to similarly impressive nominations in 2012.

The runners-up for this award were (in alphabetical order):

- Ina Smith, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa;

- Tatyana Zayseva, Khazar University, Azerbaijan;
- Xiaolin Zhang, National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Science.

The EPT wishes to congratulate them and all who have been proposed, since without exception they have made a significant personal contribution to the sharing of research findings across the world. We will be sharing some of their stories and successes on our blog over the next few weeks.

Electronic Publishing Trust for Development

Web site http://www.epublishingtrust.org

Ept Blog http://www.epublishingtrust.blogspot.com

=================================================

MANY CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR INAUGURAL WINNER!

Dr Francis Jayakinth
---------------------------------------------------------------------

We wish to stress once more that the selection of a single winner was exceedingly difficult since all nominees were very worthy and their work of such a high standard. Nominees ranged from those working on long-established developments to those setting up new ‘starter’ efforts, making progress in one or all of the aspects of Open Access, listed above. We were very encouraged to learn how much impressive work is underway around the world to achieve equitable access to research findings and hope that this Award will encourage further developments in the years ahead.

While established efforts in the ‘North’ now debate the finer points of Open Access and are frustrated at the too-slow speed of adoption, the developing world is marching ahead with establishing essential infrastructure, recognising the great benefits that OA can bring to authors, their institutes and indeed to the progress of research in their regions.

We will be posting further details of the excellent work of some of our nominees in the weeks ahead.

The Impact Factor as a measure of research quality is no longer appropriate - OA has the answer

2011-12-18T02:25:00.000-08:00

Leslie Chan, Director of Bioline International and EPT Trustee, argues that the continuing use of the Impact Factor as a measurement of research quality is no longer appropriate and excludes much valuable research carried out in the developing world. Researchers from developing countries feel the need to publish in journals with high impact levels as measured by the Thomon Reuter's IF and their research agenda is consequently often dictated by this, rather than by national and regional needs for research effort. Other metrics are more inclusive and should replace the IF in this open networked climate. Click on SciDevNet to read his opinion piece.

JISC offer to promote OA activities - forwarded

2011-11-16T09:06:00.000-08:00

From: Internal announcement list for JISC Advance [JISC-ADVANCE-STAFF@JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf Of Daniel McCaffrey [danmccaffrey@RSC-SOUTH-WEST.AC.UK]
Sent: 16 November 2011 15:16
To: JISC-ADVANCE-STAFF@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: JISC Open Campaign Steering Group-Request

Dear Colleagues,

I'm one of the JISC Advance representatives on the steering group orchestrating JISC's national "Open" campaign.

The group are engaged in planning promotional activities for JISC to push the "open" agenda to supported Institutions. Can any RSC/JISC Advance colleagues avail me of any Open-related comms activity coming up in the new year that would benefit from being promoted on a corporate level, as JISC aim to create a calendar of relevant activities to push throughout the campaign.

If you have anything of interest, please let me know.

Best Wishes, Dan McCaffrey

Beyond Open Access - new technology provides appropriate methodologies for sharing research knowledge in the developing world

2011-11-14T10:39:00.000-08:00

Beyond Open Access

– new opportunities for scholarly communication in developing countries

Leslie Chan, Trustee of EPT and Director of Bioline International, presented the following video at the recent BioMedCentral Open Access Africa Conference held at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wJXcm-xTfU&feature=youtu.be. As well as outlining the aims and the resources available from Bioline International and the usage that is made globally of developing country research from this platform, he discussed the need for a rethink on the evaluation of research articles and journals, based on their relevance to development in emerging countries of the world. He emphasised that the goal of Bioline International is not solely a means of increasing the Impact Factor of journals based on Northern values and suggested that the future of sharing research globally will be met in additional ways than by traditional journals. He introduced the concepts of networked knowledge, open science and a new invisible college, and explains how these new technologies are more appropriate for the advancement of research in the developing world.

Just 19 days left to send nominations for the EPT OA Award

2011-11-10T09:35:00.000-08:00

Colleagues, this is a reminder that if you wish to make a nomination for the EPT open access award for individuals in developing countries that have made a significant contribution to the progress of Open Access, there are only 21 days left before nominations close. Click here to get all details. We look forward to hearing from you.

Two studies of the use of OA journals in India

2011-11-05T03:09:00.000-07:00

Two publications on the use of OA journals by researchers in India have been published recently in Current Science. Below are the conclusions and a link to the full texts. Between them they provide a comprehensive picture of the status of OA in India.

[1] Subbiah Gunasekaran and Subbiah Arunachalam: Use of open access journals by Indian researchers: CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 101, NO. 10, 25 NOVEMBER 2011, Page 1287-1295. For the full text (which includes many tables and graphs) see http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/forthcoming/GA2282.pdf

Conclusion:

OA to research findings can be provided by two ways: by publishing the papers in OA journals (the gold route) and or by placing the full text of the papers along with metadata in interoperable OA archives (the green route). At least three leading publishers of S&T journals in India have opted to go the OA way. MedKnow publishes more than 150 OA journals. The Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, adopted OA for all its journals more than ten years ago. Indeed, Pramana, its physics journal, was made open access in July 1998. More recently, CSIR made all 16 research journals published by the National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources OA. A few years ago the Indian Council of Medical Research made the Indian Journal of Medical Research OA. While these moves are certainly welcome, we believe that the OA archives route is the ideal solution, especially for developing countries. No matter whether they publish their papers in OA or toll-access journals, Indian researchers will do well to place the full text of their papers in institutional repositories. Stevan Harnad, founder of Psycoloquy stopped publishing the journal in 2001, as it became clear to him by then that author self-archiving in interoperable institutional repositories was the best route to ensure 100% OA to the world’s scholarly literature.

In November 2009, 41 Nobel laureates wrote an open letter to the US Congress expressing their support to OA to research. They believed that the open availability of research ‘will make it easier for scientists worldwide to better and more swiftly address the complex scientific challenges that we face today and expand shared knowledge across disciplines to accelerate breakthrough and spur innovation’. P. Balaram told SciDev.Net; ‘I think every institution should be encouraged to set up a repository. This is a problem-free model I want to promote. There may be a few glitches at the start, but the next generation of scientists will be comfortable with it’. In a recent blog posting, Giridhar said, ‘The best way to make the work open access in India is not necessarily by publishing it in open access journals but by depositing the article in an institutional repository’. The Indian Academy of Sciences has recently set up a repository for papers by all its Fellows, both living and deceased. As of 7 October 2011, more than 60,500 paper/documents were deposited, but a vast majority of them do not provide access to the full text. One has to be content with metadata and abstracts. CSIR has decided to set up repositories in each one of its more than 35 laboratories.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[2] Subbiah Arunachalam and Muthu Madhan, Use made of open access journals by Indian researchers to publish their findings, CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 100, NO. 9, 10 MAY 2011, Page 1297-1306. For the full text, see http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/10may2011/1297.pdf

Conclusion

Indian researchers publish a large number of papers in OA journals, not necessarily because more than 360 Indian journals are OA. Their contribution to high-impact international biomedical OA journals is modest at best. However, India’s contribution to Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports is substantial. There are two reasons for this: India has a strong and vibrant community of inorganic crystallographers and the journal charges only $ 150 for processing a paper. A similar study on India’s participation in international OA journals in other fields, such as physics, chemistry, earth sciences and engineering will be interesting. Ideally though, Indian researchers and funding agencies should prefer the institutional archiving route recommended by both Harnad1,18 and Balaram. One hundred per cent OA through archiving should be the national goal. As pointed out by Joshi and as has been demonstrated most recently by the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, Kochi, starting and filling an institutional EPrints archive is easy, inexpensive, and immensely beneficial to all. However, six years after the first workshop on setting up OA repositories was held in May 2004, we have not more than 40 active repositories in the country. We believe that such repositories would come up in most, if not all, higher educational and research institutions in the country if the Ministers in charge of both higher education and science and technology send out a note stating that from now on all publicly-funded research should be available through OA channels.

Open scholarship in the developing world, a video presented by Leslie Chan, 24.10.11

2011-10-26T03:52:00.000-07:00

Leslie Chan, EPT Trustee and Director of Bioline International at the University of Toronto, gave the following video presentation at the Open Access Conference at the Kwama Nkrumah University in Kumsai. Ghana, see: http://vimeo.com/30922669. Titled, 'Opportunities for open scholarship in Africa', Leslie Chan first described the structure and use of the Bioline project, which aims to provide visibility for local research, and then went on to discuss the importance of relevant research and the need to consider new ways to distribute research findings in areas with limited infrastructure. He discussed the need for new and relevant standards, the need for widening the development of open scholarship to include new value metrics, new standards and new technologies that address local conditions. His presentation included two clips from videos of two African Professors from Kenya and Botswana who support the value of Open Access for research in their countries and have personal experience of its impact on development.

This presentation introduced new concepts that may provide better, more appropriate means for the exchange of essential research findings from the developing world.

2011-10-24T10:27:00.000-07:00

Open Access week is here, and one of the major events taking place is the important Berlin 9 conference, to be held this year in Washington DC. See http://www.berlin9.org/program/index.shtml for the programme.

Of particular interest is a pre-conference workshop on OA policy on the afternoon of Tuesday 8 November, from 2-4 pm.

The purpose of the session is to describe the different policy approaches that have been taken and how effectively they can be made to work in practice.

There are four speakers, as below, and the session has been organised by the OA expert, Alma Swan of Key Perspectives Ltd.:

1. Welcome and introduction (10 minutes): Alma Swan
2. Mandatory policy with rights retention [Harvard, Kansas SU]: Stuart Shieber, Jeff Vitter]
3. Mandatory policy without rights retention (but inked to assessment processes [Liege]: Bernard Rentier
4. Mandatory policy with intense library advocacy [Glasgow]: William Nixon
5. Q and A / discussion

IFLA establishes OA Task Force

2011-10-16T09:20:00.000-07:00

The International Federation of Libraries Association (IFLA) has endorsed open access and established (Bordeaux, October 11^th 2011) an OA Task Force to take this forward. The Task Force will work on the following issues:

- Advocate for the adoption and promotion of OA policies within the framework of the UN institutions;

- Build capacity within the IFLA Memebership to advocate for OA at the national level, through the development of case studies and best practices for OA promotion;

- Connect to various organisations working for OA – such as SPARC, COAR, OASPA, EIFL, Bioline International & DOAJ, among others.

The first step is to produce a road map for the work to be presented to IFLA Governing Board in December 2011, and to begin collecting case studies and best practice as to how the library associations can promote national policies and programmes to foster the progress of OA.

Dedicated web pages will be created in cooperation with IFLA Head Quarters.

The Task Force has the following members (two of which are Trustees of the EPT):

- Lars Bjornshauge,1st Vice President Swedish Library Association (contact, see below)

- Christoph Bruch, Member Ellen Tise´ Presidential working group on OA

- Leslie Chan, Associate Director Bioline International, Trustee EPT, University of Toronto, Scarborough, Canada;
- Jan Hegerlid, Programme Coordinator of OA se, National Library of Sweden

- Iryna Kuchma, EIFL Net, OA Manager, Rome, Italy

- Derek Law, Professor University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, United Kingdom, Chair EPT

- Rick Luce, Vice Provost and Director of Libraries, Emory University, USA

- Felipe Martinez, Director, University Center for Library Science Research, Autonomous University of Mexico

- Reggie Raju, Member Ellen Tise´ Presidential working group on OA

- Bas Savenijie, Diector, National Library of Netherlands

- Xuamao Wang, Associate Vice-Provost, Emory University Libraries, Emory University, USA

- Qiang Zhu, Director, Peking University Library, Beijing, China

From announcement sent by:

Lars Bjornshauge

Independent Libraries & Scholarly Communications Professional

1st Vicce President Swedish Library Association

mobile phone +45 53510603

Skype id: lbj-lub0603

e-mail elbjoern0603@gmail.com

EPT Award for indviduals in developing countries working for OA

2011-10-01T01:19:00.000-07:00

THE 2011 EPT AWARD FOR INDIVIDUALS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES WORKING FOR OA

Open Access Week arrives again this October, and is a time to celebrate all that has been achieved in the previous twelve months. The Electronic Publishing Trust is a long standing advocate of OA and the difference it can make. As our contribution to this year’s OA Week, we are launching an annual international award to recognise the impact that individuals can make. It is to be hoped that such international recognition will acknowledge the very real efforts being made by many individuals throughout the world, and will accelerate the development of models for achieving the open and free transfer of essential information for the progress of research.

ANNOUNCEMENT : The Electronic Publishing Trust* is pleased to announce that it is launching an annual award for individuals in developing and transition countries** who have made significant advances to the cause of open access and the free exchange of research findings.

Nominations are sought for the first such award. Individuals or organisations may nominate themselves or others, sending a statement using the attached form to the chair of the EPT Board, (d.law@strath.ac.uk) outlining the achievements of the individual. Please find the nominations form below.

Nominations should be received by 30th November 2011. Selection of a winner will be made by a panel of three EPT Board Members which will be chaired by Dr Alma Swan (http://bit.ly/aQXNEy) a well-known figure in Open Access advocacy.

The result will be announced in January 2012 and it is intended that a presentation will be made at a location convenient to the winner. The prizewinner will be publicly recognised through the presentation of a certificate and an engraved award. It is also hoped to have a “fringe” event at future OA meetings to celebrate the work of the winner.

*The Electronic Publishing Trust for Development (EPT) was established in 1996 to facilitate open access to the world's scholarly literature and to support the electronic publication of reviewed bioscience journals from countries experiencing difficulties with traditional publication.

**As defined by the UN at http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49regin.htm#transition

EPT Award submission form for nominations

1. Nominations may be made by individuals or organisations.

2. The EPT Award is for individuals who have made an impact on the progress of open access to research findings.

3. Please supply the following information:

Name of nominee:

Affiliation of nominee:

Position or role of nominee:

Contact address and email of nominee:

Contact address and email of proposer:

Please provide a brief statement to describe the ACTIVITIES of the nominee in support of Open Access (no more than 250 words):

Please describe the RESULTS of these activities (no more than 200 words):

Please describe the SIGNIFICANCE of these activities and results for Open Access (no more than 200 words):

Please send your proposal by 30/11/2011 to: EPT Chair, Derek Law, at derek.law@strath.ac.uk

October 1st 2011

An important OA meeting in Brussels

2011-09-07T03:40:00.000-07:00

This is just to inform you of an important open access meeting in Brussels, on September 28th 2011. Here is the link to the programme:

One man went to work* – a catalytic converter

2011-08-01T06:52:00.000-07:00

News of a recently registered institutional repository (IR) has emerged. Called Catalysis Database, it uses the Eprints software and can be accessed at http://203.199.213.48/. It is hosted by the National Center for Catalysis Research (NCCR) at the Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IITM), and contains published research articles, unpublished concept articles, theses, reports, working papers, teaching resources and much more. There are currently over 1740 items archived, and the remarkable point to note is that this effort has been driven by a single man, Professor B Viswanathan, and follows from his attendance at an open access workshop organized by EPT Trustee Professor Subbiah Arunachalam.

The professor has acknowledged that it would not have been possible without the help of a young IITM undergraduate student(Venkatasubramanian Viswanathan) with computer skills, who was able to set up the repository ‘within days or hours’ and who still helps resolve any technical problems that arise, ‘though now working in the USA. But it is clear that the driving force was a single person who had the vision and open mind to understand the concept of open access as presented at a workshop, and to see the vast potential of such a repository. Most of the deposit of material has been carried out by Viswanathan himself as he found there were many inaccuracies when carried out direct by the authors, leading to failed searches. He has received no direct input from his institution, apart from registration of the domain name, carrying out the work himself. He describes the repository as an education and knowledge resource for catalysis since it also includes book chapters and other material of general relevance to this discipline.

And the cost? The server was purchased by the Catalysis Society of India for hosting its online journal and other catalysis purposes. The Institute covers the costs of direct online access and maintenances. Viswathan says, ‘I would not say the cost was free, but hidden’ as he was able to take advantage of the spare capacity within the ICT facilities at his institute. Since the resource is also a major contribution to his own work in many ways – allowing download of data in response to student class queries, for example - the time he exerted was also in the interest of the NCCR and part of his regular teaching and research work in the catalysis field.

He reports that the IR is used extensively on a global basis, and describes how he himself was able to prepare a lecture at short notice by downloading much information from the IR while attending an American Chemical Society meeting in March 2011. He had been ill-informed about his role as a main speaker, discovering the error only on the conference notice board on arrival.

It is good to know that he has benefited himself from his own efforts, but the value of the resource to the science of catalysis must be very substantial. One man and a student from the NCCR institute have achieved a catalytic impact on their discipline, though it is surely unlikely that the effort has left the ‘agent’ unchanged.

Our congratulations to Professor Viswanathan and the NCCR student – we hope all catalysis researchers appreciate their good fortune.

*Counting Nursery Song, ‘One man went to mow’ - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1TD95M8Fe4

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

2011-07-04T13:57:00.000-07:00

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.”

Note: there is a link to the EIFL Newsletter on the right column of this blog.

OA by numbers - getting the sums right

2011-06-21T02:28:00.000-07:00

Richard Poynder has once more carried out an authoritative interview, this time addressing the complex issue of calculating the progress of open access. The interview focuses mainly on the work of Yassine Gargouri, working recently with Stevan Harnad, but includes calculations made by others. The interview is here: http://poynder.blogspot.com/2011/06/open-access-by-numbers.html.

There are a number of charts showing the progress recorded, including the highly significant impact of institutional mandates on the speed of progress - the numbers of articles that are open access rising from 22% to 64% in repositories where a mandate operates.

There is a link from this interview to one carried out with Alma Swan previously, in which the future of scholarly communication is discussed.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. This permits you to copy and distribute it as you wish, so long as you credit Richard Poynder as the author, do not alter or transform the text, and do not use it for any commercial purpose. If you would like to republish the interview on a commercial basis, or have any comments on it, you may email Richard Poynder on richard.poynder@btinternet.com.

Liege leads the way in OA understanding

2011-06-10T05:28:00.000-07:00

An interview by Richard Poynder with the Rector of Liege University, Bernard Rentier, provides a perfect understanding of the way to implement Open Access. His personal commitment and ability to make the critical arguments that will inform his colleagues at the University have resulted in its institutional repository, named ORBi, the Open Repository and Bibliography, being ranked the top and most active OA repository, with more than 62,000 records in its archive, of which 37,500 are full text publications.

When asked what were the key arguments that have persuaded his colleagues to embrace the OA philosophy, he answered:'Concern about the cost of scholarly journals; concern about having an inventory of the university’s production; and concern about having a showcase of the university’s research performance.'

To see the full interview, click here.

Fortunately, the creation of the Enabling Open Scholarship, of which Rentier is Chair, allows his clear vision and experience to be extended to academic organisations everywhere.

If you read nothing else this weekend, read this interview. Our thanks to the work of Richard Poynder.

EPT article selected for WHO/PLoS World Health Report 2012

2011-06-08T07:11:00.000-07:00

An article authored by Leslie Chan, Subbiah Arunachalam and Barbara Kirsop has been selected for inclusion in a WHO/PLoS Collection of articles for the World Health Report 2012. See here for the collection, or here specifically for this article.

Open Access in a nutshell

2011-05-20T07:19:00.000-07:00

When you need to persuade people about the value of open access, short briefing papers can often help. Busy people will have time to read them and they can answer their concerns quickly, where more in depth articles may stay at the bottom of the pile. Here are four useful papers from experienced practitioners who have traveled the road successfully. They are titled:

Open Access: in support of research - Paul Ayris
Open Access: beyond the numbers - Martin Hall
Open Access: embedding repositories - Susan Ashworth
Gold Open Access Publishing - Jill Russell

They come from the Centre for Research Communications, based at the University of Nottingham.

UNESCO announces GOAP (Global Open Access Portal)

2011-04-17T03:30:00.000-07:00

While we greatly welcome UNESCO’s acknowledgement of the value of Open Access, and are interested to hear about its plans for a global open access portal (see http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=31316&URL_DO=DO_PRINTPAGE&URL_SECTION=201.html), we have concerns about the aims of this initiative. The announcement says GOAP “is supposed to be the first destination for users seeking information on OA. OA experts will collect, analyse and filter information related to the subject from different countries.” It also states “GOAP aims to assist UNESCO Member States in understanding the current state of Open Access and in taking appropriate decisions.”

These aims are admirable, but our concern is that they are already underway through a number of well-established initiatives, such as the OSI-supported Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS), see www.openoasis.org, or Peter Suber’s authoritative monthly report on the status of OA, see http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/archive.htm, to name but two. There are many other OA developments of which UNESCO must be aware and will not want to duplicate.

As a platform for OA, OASIS is led by foremost OA experts, Dr Alma Swan (Key Perspectives) and Professor Leslie Chan (University of Toronto), with input from many academic authorities around the world. Peter Suber’s SPARC-supported reports are unmatchable in authority. We would like to know what is different about the GOAP concept and how does it complement and support existing initiatives? Perhaps there are real differences planned. Perhaps UNESCO has identified gaps that could be filled?

Funding is limited in today’s environment and it would surely be wise to avoid duplication and complement existing efforts? ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants’ is the oft-quoted concept that underpins progress in research. We can think of very many open access initiatives (such as the EIFL network in developing and emerging countries, the global network of OA institutional repositories, the established consortia of OA journals - SciELO, Bioline International, MedKnow Publications), the progress of which would be significantly accelerated with UNESCO providing support and global outreach.

All OA advocates and experts will welcome UNESCO’s wish to strengthen OA in its member countries and we hope it is not too late to consider further and take advice from the international network of open access communities before finalizing plans for GOAP. UNESCO is a ‘new boy on the OA block’ and if it can reach out to existing developments and experts, it can make a real difference to the free exchange of essential research knowledge.

Equitable access to research - walking in the right direction

2011-03-31T02:19:00.000-07:00

PLoS Medicine has written an editorial following up on what has become known as 'the Bangladesh debacle' caused by the withdrawal of access to HINARI journals, see here .. The editors of PLoS Medicine invited trustees of the EPT to provide an essay related to the editorial and giving their view on the continuing needs of the developing world's research community. The essay, published simultaneously, and titled 'Towards open and equitable access to research and knowledge development' can be seen here.

OA-Advocacy support from EIFL

2011-02-02T08:05:00.000-08:00

EIFL have issued a Call for Proposals from their member countries to advance open access. Click on the link for full application details. The application deadline is February 28th 2011. The preamble says:

"The EIFL-OA programme invites proposals for organising national or institutional open access advocacy campaigns to reach out to research communities. We particularly wish to involve scholarly and scientific researchers, universities and colleges, and university presses and society publishers."

Publishers withdraw Bangladeshi access to 2500 journals

2011-01-14T04:07:00.000-08:00

The news (BMJ 2011; 342:d196) that a number of commercial publishers partnering in the HINARI programme have pulled out their services to Bangladesh by withdrawing 2500 journals comes as no surprise. Intermittent withdrawals have been recorded from time to time, and indeed other withdrawals may not have been reported.

Publishers have every right to protect their markets and profits, and this is why advocates of the Open Access developments have been working hard to promote instead the benefits of OA as a reliable, research-driven means to provide peer reviewed publications for the research communities, both through interoperable OA institutional repositories and OA journals. The UN programmes (HINARI, OARE, AGORA) have always discriminated between countries because they are based on the arbitrary criteria of national GDP. Even for qualified countries, access is barred to those where publishers have existing markets (India and South Africa, for example, are denied access). Moreover access is only through registered organisations so that individual researchers in other laboratories are similarly barred from access. EPT colleagues have repeatedly warned that these donor programmes cannot be depended upon as sustainable fixtures and have continued to work to persuade the UN agencies to put their weight behind OA and all its benefits. It remains a mystery that these powerful organisations, while purporting to approve the OA movement, do little to help raise awareness, support training and advocacy.

Meanwhile, organisations such as EIFL, Bioline International, MedKnow Publications, SciELO, EPT and many others have made great progress in providing research publications and practical services to promote not only access to the global science base but also to provide a platform for national journals to ‘become international’ through OA-provided increased visibility – a South to North and South to South flow of research information as well as the invaluable North to South flow (see ‘Pre-OA national journals become post-OA international journals’ on http://epublishingtrust.blogspot.com/2011/01/pre-open-access-local-journals-become.html). This link includes a very interesting video (see http://vimeo.com/10169351) of Professor Mary Abukutsa-Onyango discussing the importance of Open Access for research in Kenya and other African countries.

Globally, the recent review of OA progress in 2010 by Peter Suber (see http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-11.htm) stated "The growth of OA over the past year was deep, wide, and steady" and provided a summary of the many new developments – the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) added 4 new titles/day, Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR), recorded 10 new repositories/week, and so on. This movement is steadily becoming accepted as the future mechanism for the distribution of essential research findings - and now is the time to make renewed efforts in raising awareness of the vast and growing volume of articles that OA has already delivered.

Commercial publishers cannot be expected to donate free access to their journals indefinitely and it is up to the research communities to renew efforts to consolidate what has been achieved so far. There is no need to despair that all is lost, and EPT calls on academic communities to recognise the importance of OA in the support of research in poor regions of the world. This matters to us all, since the research generated in these regions completes the global picture of the situation in health, agriculture, climate change, energy provision and all other aspects of our existence. Rather than try to reinstate the HINARI donations, only to be disappointed further down the line, better by far to work with all OA advocates and initiatives to ensure that everyone is aware of what is available to them already - or of what they are missing by not accessing OA resources. See the OASIS resource for practical information on how to implement Open Access http://www.openoasis.org.

Let’s make 2011 the year all researchers in the information-deprived regions are made aware of OA resources. Why depend on the vagaries of the market when alternatives are there at the click of a mouse?

‘Pre-open access local journals’ become ‘post-open access international journals’

2011-01-07T04:35:00.000-08:00

The following exchange took place on the HIFA2015 forum as part of a wider debate on issues affecting the promotion of local research. Swarna Bandara, Jamaica, made several points regarding this problem and touched on the importance of publishing research findings (see extract below). I responded, wishing to emphasise the importance of this for strengthening national and institutional research.

“Swarna Bandara has clearly outlined the difficulty that researchers in LDCs find in publishing their research findings. I want to emphasise the importance of this problem. Since all researchers loose heart and motivation if they see no hope of publishing their research and making a contribution to knowledge in their area of interest, the inability to publish is a critical issue adversely affecting the strength of local research. Frustrated authors become isolated and feel that their work is pointless. And this has been justified since, as has been pointed out, ‘international journals’ generally take but a minor interest in local issues and the only way LDC authors can get published is by partnering with laboratories in the advanced countries. Again, [co-authoring] sometimes does little to build capacity in publishing skills or ultimately in the progress of research itself. The alternative has been to publish in national journals which had less visibility and therefore provided limited impact.

But there has been a substantial shift in this dismal picture, as Bandara has pointed out. The open access (OA) developments not only have made possible global access to published research, free of cost through deposits in interactive institutional repositories (IRs) or through OA journals, but have also made possible the increase in visibility of local journals. Organisations such as SciELO (http://www.scielo.org), Bioline International (http://www.bioline.org.br), MedKnow Publications (http://www.medknow.com) and others are providing platforms for open access journals published in the developing world, thus greatly increasing impact and international recognition. HIFA members may like to listen to this video (see http://vimeo.com/10169351) of Professor Mary Abukutsa-Onyango discussing the importance of Open Access for research in Kenya and other African countries (she discusses her past publishing difficulties for her work in agriculture, but the point she makes is relevant to all research. The video was made by Leslie Chan, Trustee EPT and Director of Bioline International).

Usage of these sites is very good, demonstrating the wide need for local research findings once they become accessible. For example, there were approaching 5 million full text downloads from the Bioline site in 2009, and MedKnow has recorded not only similarly high downloads, but increased submissions (including from international authors), increased impact and increased income of printed journals due to increased visibility and status. The ‘pre-open access local journals’ are becoming ‘post-open access international journals’.

Full text downloads of articles from OA institutional repositories are similarly encouraging, demonstrating how the transition to open access to publicly funded research is steadily levelling the playing field both for access to the global research resource and for the distribution of ‘national’ research information, see for example the Venezuelan University de Los Andes statistics for usage of its IR (in Spanish): http://www.saber.ula.ve/stats?level=general&type=access&page=downviews-series&start=01-01-2011&end=02-01-2011&pyear=2011&pmonth=01&anoinicio=2011&anofim=2011&mesinicio=01&mesfim=01

Inevitably, these developments will spill over into the research communities in LDCs, providing encouragement, new contacts, and new opportunities for local research endeavours. And as regional research becomes internationalised, administrators will see the value to local economies of increasing support for national research, as has been shown to take place in the developed world, see http://www.openoasis.org/images/stories/file/Briefing%20papers/Open%20Access%20impact.pdf. . . . . . .".

----- Original Message -----

From: Swarna Bandara

To: HIFA2015 - Healthcare Information For All by 2015

Sent: Saturday, December 25, 2010 2:40 PM

Subject: [HIFA2015] Promoting local research (19)

Dear HIFA2015 Community

In response to Nuwan and Saroj I want to comment on three issues.

1. Lack of Research Information from LDC
. . . . .

Use of Information Communication Technology (ICT) help to make these data available with anytime anywhere access. Concepts of Open Access (OA), Institutional Repositories (IR) are utilized by many large LDC to communicate research and make these available globally. The journal publishing model implemented by the Latin America and the Caribbean at www.scielo.org is a fine example of use ITC for research information. Tools such as Open Journal System promoted by Public Knowledge Project for e-journals publishing and DSpace for IR are freely available and there is community support. In order to implement an initiative for OA to research, need collaboration between information generators, managers, distributors, facilitators and administrators including governments. Most LDC, particularly Sri Lanka and number of African countries have not taken advantage of these free resources while developed countries are taking full advantage. See the membership of NDLTD (Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations) and see how many LDC are in it. NIH the largest funder for health research mandated that research papers resulting from the research they fund must be available on Open Access within 6 months of publication. The result is those of us who cannot find resources to pay subscription to expensive journals can now access these through PUBMED Central. Some EU member countries, funding agencies such as Welcome Trust, and academic institutions also have similar mandates.

Why such opportunities are not used to make any usable data already exist and/or starting new e-journals using these tools to make the voice heard?

. . . . ..

Swarna Bandara

(Former Head, Medical Library, University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Kingston, Jamaica)
(Former Coordinator of ETD/DSpace Project at Mona Campus)
(Former VHL National Coordinator, Jamaica)

HIFA2015 profile: Swarna Bandara is former Head of the Medical Library at the University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica. She is ETD/DSpace Coordinator (ED/DSpace is an international repository for electonic theses and dissertations), and Virtual Health Library National Coordinator. Her professional interests include Open Access, Electronic publishing, Health Science Information, and Information skills training. swarna.bandara AT uwimona.edu.jm

Posted by Barbara Kirsop

A 2010 review of all things OA

2011-01-03T05:02:00.000-08:00

Peter Suber has published his annual review of developments in OA (journals, repositories, policies, data, books . . . ). As usual, this is a wonderfully authoritative and comprehensive report that has an encouraging message for 2011 for all those commited to the free sharing of publicly funded research findings. He heads his report with these words, "The growth of OA over the past year was deep, wide, and steady." and provides a summary of the many new developments - DOAJ added 4 new titles/day, ROAR recorded 10 new repositories/week, and so on. But on the downside the lack of awareness of all these benefits is still too high in both the developed and less developed countries, showing that much remains to be done by organisations such as the EPT to continue to inform and to correct misunderstandings.

May 2011 be another year of continuing OA progress and may all researchers in the poorer nations suffer from information overload in the future!

An OA declaration from Southern Europe - the Alhambra Declaration

2010-12-29T09:37:00.000-08:00

Following a workshop that took place in May 2010 in Granada, Spain, the Alhambra Declaration on Open Access was announced. The aim of the declaration is to develop an action plan for Open Access in southern Europe. For the full text of the declaration, see here.

Open Access in Africa - a conference organised by BioMedCentral

2010-12-07T03:11:00.000-08:00

A valuable conference was organised recently by BMC, titled Open Access Africa. There is now an excellent web site available from which all presentations may be viewed, see here . Presentations range from overviews of OA in Africa to OA-experiences of individual organisations, both publishers and university repositories. Note also, the presentations by EPT colleagues, Daisy Ouya and Eve Gray.

Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean countries make an OA Declaration at a NECOBELAC workshop

2010-11-20T11:05:00.000-08:00

On November 11th 2010, the participants of the NECOBELAC project worksop, held in Bogota, commited themselves to the following objectives:

1. Promote the drawing up and enforcement of public policies in favour of the unlimited availability of scientific output.

2. Promote and support the quality of scientific writing.

3 Promote Open Access to scientific output in their Nations.

Participants on the NECOBELAC training course commited themselves to replicating the training experience in the institutions of their countries and to providing advice and tools to achieve the above mentioned objectives.

For the full Declaration and details of participating cuntries and organisations, see the Declaration (in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and English):

http://www.necobelac.eu/documents/Bogota%20Declaration_4_Languages.pdf

A new OA tool on the way – mapping OA around the world!

2010-11-04T10:32:00.000-07:00

Just released at the Berlin8 Conference in Beijing is news of a valuable new OA tool, being developed by the OASIS team, and supported by the Open Society Foundation.

It is now very clear that there is such a rollercoast of OA activities happening around the world that we are all in danger of losing track of each other, re-inventing wheels, not being aware of specialised OA experts, missing out on possible partnerships - - -

Happily the OASIS people are ahead of us and have already set in motion the development of an OA Map. This not only logs, links and maps all OA activities (IRs, journals, software, policies . . . ), but will also provide a dynamic timeline of OA progress that will not only be an invaluable historical reference, but additionally an advocacy tool.

Bookmark the OA Map page, here and watch the short video that explains the project and invites all OA initiatives to make contact so that they can be put on the map.

Make sure your initiative is on the OA Map!

Some of the brilliant highlights of Open Access Week

2010-10-27T03:02:00.000-07:00

For the EPT and others working with researchers in developing countries, the highlight of OA Week has to be the astonisihing list of activities that took place throughout the EIFL partnership countries. There is such a lot happening in these regions - but so also in the rest of the world.

Especially exciting was the growth in the adoption of OA mandates during OA Week- see here. Eleven new mandates were put in place during OA week alone, requiring deposit of published research in their institute's repository - from Arizona to Wageningen OA marches on..

And the Eprints team made available a very enjoyable and interesting rotating global map of new Institutional Repositories. By clicking here, the site highlights new IRs around the world, providing a brief description (often in the language of the IR country) and a link to the IR. This is an eye-opening panorama of the research that is now available for free to all. Although said to be 'temporary', it is to be hoped that this resource can become permanent as it is a strong advocacy tool for OA. Make a cup of coffeee, click on the link and sit back and enjoy an IR-trail around the world!

And the work continues . . . The Berlin8 Conference in Beijing is underway this week, with many presentations, posters and videos, - and organisations are consolidating the work they put in place last week - and the EPT continues to collect 'OA stories' A new posting from the Italian Volcanology and Geophysics oganisation was added today, the recent Indonesian earthquake highlihting the need for free global exchange.of essential information.

Open Access Week 2010 - EPT's collection of your OA stories

2010-10-17T05:56:00.000-07:00

Open Access Week is here! As a contribution to the festivities, the EPT has been collecting and harvesting stories and short reports, and making links to blogs and videos that provide insight into the way the Open Access developments have affected research and researchers around the world.

This is an on-going activity and we will continue to add new stories to the 'OA Stories' page on the EPT web site. To link direct to the stories click here.

Please continue to send short stories to ept@biostrat.demon.co.uk. Sometimes individual experiences make a greater impact on people's understanding of Open Access than would a presentation or article.

Sincere thanks to all who have contributed so far - your stories will stay in people's minds!

Open Access position with UNESCO

2010-09-21T10:45:00.000-07:00

Colleagues, there is an Open Access consultancy post now available at UNESCO in Paris. See announcement below:

Dear Open Access colleagues,

The overarching objective of UNESCO is to build inclusive knowledge societies and we have identified Open Access (OA) to scientific information as a key implementation strategy. Our programme is highlighted here .

We are urgently looking to engage a highly skilled and experienced Open Access expert as a temporary consultant to advance our 2010 - 2011 Workplan. A Brief Terms of Reference (TOR) is provided below and the Extended TOR will be provided on request.

We would greatly appreciate it if you could please recommend possible candidates including their e-mail address or (mobile) phone number, and if you could forward this message to your OA networks.

We look forward to hearing from you, please reply all.

Regards,
Abel Caine (a.caine@unesco.org)

ICT in Education, Science and Culture Section
Information Society Division
Communication and Information (CI) Sector
UNESCO

==============================

The UNESCO Communication and Information (CI) Sector is looking to urgently engage a temporary consultant with high levels of skills and experience in the area of Open Access (OA) to scientific information.

An ethical issue for research authors

2010-09-14T02:31:00.000-07:00

Here is a powerful comment on the recent announcement by a number of publishers to make their publications free for a limited period to readers in areas suffering from natural disasters. Dr Neil Pakenham Walsh (co-Director of the Global Health Information Network and the respected coordinator of the Health Information for All Network – HIFA2015) welcomes the move, but also queries the ethical reasons for restricting access to essential information. He refers to health information, but the argument can be extended to research publications and data necessary for overcoming all global problems – in climate change, agriculture, clean energy developments and so on.

This is not the problem of publishers who have a right to run their businesses on a fair commercial basis, but it is the problem of researchers themselves - those that without financial reward provide the information for the publishers. Authors should recognise that they have an ethical as well as a self-advancing reason for making their research knowledge available free to all. They should ask themselves whether their research findings are important to other researchers around the world for the advancement of science. If the answer is ‘Yes’, they can instantly remedy the situation (without cost, and while continuing to publish in their chosen journal, whether open access or not) by archiving a copy of their refereed and accepted article in an open access repository. See OASIS for all information related to open access and how it works for the research community.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Neil Pakenham-Walsh"
To: "HIFA2015 - Healthcare Information For All by 2015"

Sent: Saturday, September 11, 2010 1:00 PM
Subject: [HIFA2015] Forward: [DISASTR-OUTREACH-LIB ] Full-text material for
Pakistan

> Dear HIFA2015 colleagues,

The message below is forwarded from the email forum [DISASTR-OUTREACH-LIB ]. I think this move by restricted-access journals - to open access for a few weeks in response to major disasters - is welcome. *But* it also raises interesting moral and ethical questions about the status quo: the world's scholarly journals and other knowledge
resource continue to be mainly restricted-access, while the silent and ongoing disaster continues: tens of thousands of people dying unnecessarily each day in developing countries - while policymakers, healthcare providers, and citizens lack access to the information they need to support policymaking, health care, and the capacity to make vital decisions for themselves and their loved ones.

Best wishes,
Neil

> HIFA2015 profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is the coordinator of the HIFA2015
> campaign and co-director of the Global Healthcare Information Network. He
> started his career as a hospital doctor in the UK, and has clinical
> experience in rural Ecuador and Peru. For the last 20 years he has been
> committed to improving the availability of healthcare information for
> health workers in developing countries. He has worked with the World
> Health Organization, the Wellcome Trust, Medicine Digest and INASP
> (International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications).
> www.hifa2015.org neil.pakenham-walsh AT ghi-net.org

Portuguese-speakers have an OA Blog

2010-09-09T02:17:00.000-07:00

Professor Helio Kuramoto, working until recently with IBICT in Brazil, maintains a valuable Open Access Blog, see here. Kuramoto has been instrumental in working towards an OA mandate in Brazil and in introducing and distributing software packages for setting up Institutional Repositories in the country.

A comprehensive introductory Powerpoint presentation on the benefits and mechanisms of introducing OA is provided in a link from the blog, see 'Ciencia abierta Un desafio regional'.

Good advice from Mozambique

2010-09-05T08:29:00.000-07:00

“We are always getting information about Mozambique from outside. Why can’t people have information about Mozambique from Mozambique?” asked Aissa Mitha Issak, Librarian at the Universidade Pedagógica and EIFL Open Access Coordinator. “The lack of visibility for African research is frustrating”. She was speaking at the recent IFLA Gothenburg conference, at which she received the Henning Mankell Conference Grant, 2010. On the advice of Iryna Kutchma, EIFL OA-programme manager, a shared repository has been set up, linking several organisations. Aissa described the shared Mozambique Institutional Repository, launched at the end of 2009 and now holding 2,234 items of research, including theses and journal articles.

Advice for others starting up a repository? “Just do it!”, says Aissa. “Our first approach in 2006 was to make a formal proposal to university management. This strategy didn’t work, because they needed to see the repository to understand its value”. The potential is now recognised and a committee has even been established to re-evaluate students’ work. Identifying IR champions to help advocate to university management and faculty is also an important factor for success.

Congratulations to all in Mozambique who have worked to achieve this valuable resource. And congratulations to EIFL for their continuing support and advice. Link here for the full report.

Calling all OA authors!!

2010-08-20T04:19:00.000-07:00

OA week approaches! Tell your OA stories to EPT!

As our contribution to OA Week, please re-read our request for OA stories posted in April. We have already received some interesting answers to this request, but we know you have more stories to tell! We will compile your stories into an ‘OA-week story book’.

Here are some questions to stimulate you:

• Has your article been requested by more people since it was made OA?
• Have you made contact with other researchers in your field as a result of OA?
• Did you get an invitation to speak at a conference as a result of OA?
• Have you been able to agree new research partnerships as a result of higher global visibility of your publications?
• Do you access OA repositories to check progress in your field?
• Does your head of department/head of institute encourage you to make all your publications OA? If so, what reason did she/he give for that?
• Has your institute/university department climbed up the ranking level by becoming ‘internationally recognised’ through OA?
• Has your OA repository now been filled with all your organisations’ research output and do your colleagues find this useful? Useful for what purpose (we already have a lovely story from India about unusual IR usage!)?
• Has your OA repository got a statistics facility that records how your articles are being accessed from around the world? Who has the top access/download level? Was it you?!
• Has your OA journal improved its publishing frequency/full text downloads/impact factor rating/sales of hard copy through increased OA visibility?

A short piece is all we need - one or two sentences or a short paragraph will be enough to help tell other non-OA authors what they are missing!

Tell your colleagues we are waiting to hear about and share their OA-experiences!

Rich OA material from two meetings in Sweden

2010-08-16T03:13:00.000-07:00

Two important OA meetings took place between August 6 -12th, 2010, in Sweden.

The first was the 2010 General Assembly of EIFL.

The programme of the EIFL meeting is available here.[The presentations are all available from the very bottom of this web page, below the programme. Don’t miss them!]

I intended to highlight presentations most likely to be of interest to EPT Blog readers, but this is not possible as there is such a very rich programme of material. But do not miss Iryna Kutchma’s (EIFL) presentation on plans for OA Week, or those of EPT Trustee Leslie Chan on the Bioline International service, or an important report of the openAIRE programme (in which all publications from the EU’s FP7 research programmes are mandated to be made OA), or an important presentation from Alma Swan on the economics of OA, or reports from Ukraine, Zambia, Nepal, or . . .

The second meeting was a satellite IFLA meeting on ‘Open Access and the changing role of libraries’

This meeting had an equally rich programme and this and the presentations are available from here [The presentations are available down the right hand side of the web page.]

Again, there is a wealth of important material both for libraries and researchers. But don’t miss Professor Tom Cochrane’s report on experiences of OA at the Queensland University of Technology - the impact of OA on authors shown here is awesome!

Happy reading!

UNESCO supports Open Access

2010-08-01T03:40:00.000-07:00

A recent announcement from UNESCO, and made available by EPT Trustee Daisy Ouya (currently working with UNESCO in Paris), said: "UNESCO promotes and supports Open Access — the online availability of scholarly information to everyone, free of most licensing and copyright barriers — for the benefit of global knowledge flow, innovation and socio-economic development." It further stated, "Scientific information is both a researcher’s greatest output and technological innovation’s most important resource."

Not only is UNESCO supporting OA, but promoting it too. This is a most valuable development as UNESCO has the outreach power to inform and support researchers in all regions of the world, and particularly those in economically constrained countries. It is much to be hoped that this announcement will encourage other inernational organisations to adopt a similar approach in their support of the free exchange of essential research information. In practice, it must be hoped that UNESCO's programmes will focus on the development of low cost Institutional Repositories in research centres as these can archive and make available articles arising from the institution's support, thus providing international visibility for its research and ensuring its incorporation in the global knowledge base.

For further information, see here.

Normal service resumed

2010-07-15T01:33:00.000-07:00

EPT website is now back online after a problem yesterday. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Steady progress of IRs in developing countries

2010-07-09T07:03:00.000-07:00

A valuable report on progress in establishing open access institutional repositories in developing and transition nations has been published in the recent eIFL Newsletter. For the full report, see here, or follow the links from the eIFL Newsletter shown on the right hand toolbar. A summary from the report is attached below, followed by a few general comments and conclusions provided by EPT.

Report on Open Repository Development in Developing and Transition countries

The aim of the study was to create an inventory of current digital repository activities in developing and transition countries at both the infrastructure and services level. The study was conducted with the cooperation of eIFL.net, the University of Kansas Libraries, the DRIVER project and Key Perspectives Ltd.
Over the course of six months, 49 repositories from 20 countries on three continents participated in this survey. The following countries are represented: Argentina, Azerbaijan, Brazil, Cameroon, China, Ghana, Hong Kong, India, Jamaica, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Namibia, Poland, Russia, Slovenia, South Africa, Taiwan, Ukraine, Venezuela, Zimbabwe.

As of May 20, 2010, The Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) lists 277 repositories from these 20 countries (> half are from Brazil, India and Taiwan). Note: the repositories responding to this survey are not all listed in the ROAR database.

The main findings were:

• 66% of responding institutions maintain a digital repository for research output, and 15% maintain more than one digital repository for research output.

• Visibility, access, and preservation were the most important motivations cited by participating institutions to establish a repository.

• The responses show an increasing rate of growth of repositories over the last several years, and indicate that these repositories are for the most part very new services.

• Libraries play a major role in advocating and maintaining repositories.

• Theses and dissertations are the most common type of material in the responding institutions' repositories. Other common material includes full-text of research articles as peer-reviewed postprints, journals published from the institution, and conference papers.

• The majority of participating institutions (56%) stated that less than 25% of the researchers or faculty members at their institutions have deposited material in the repository. One institute recorded 100% deposit rate – this institute has an OA deposit mandate.

• About two-thirds of the participating institutions use some form of mediated deposit in which staff members or librarians are directly involved in the deposit of materials into the repository.

• DSpace is the most common software package, used by 57% of participating institutions.

• More than one third of participating institutions (38%) do not have any official policy with regard to depositing material. In others there may be some partial requirement or encouragement.

• The following services were listed in order of priority for further development: general search engines, preservation services, open access advocacy, disciplinary services, citation index services, usage statistics services, cataloguing services, deposit, publishing and printing services, repository hosting services.

***
EPT Comments: This report shows an encouraging start to the process of making developing country research more widely available. Most of the IRs are new, but the rate of increase is strong. [A check in the ROAR database on July 10th 2010 shows the total number of IRs from these 20 countries is now 315, an increase of 38 in 6 weeks; the total increase is likely to be greater than this as not all IRs are registered in ROAR].

It is clear that where an OA deposit mandate is in place, the rate of deposit is very good, confirming reported trends globally. The greatest benefit is seen by the respondents to be an increase in the visibility of institutional research. The value of OA IRs to increase citations and as a tool for administrative and promotional purposes is currently seen as of lower importance compared with the overriding need to transform poorly-known local research into a global resource. This report indicates that OA IRs are seen as a means to level the playing field in research communication.

A broader check in the ROAR database on the same date, including all developing countries, shows that in total there are 441 OA IRs now established in developing countries. This is ~ 25% of the total of ~1800 to date. Considering the more restricted resources available in these regions, this shows a growing understanding of the benefits OA can provide in strengthening research in the developing world.

Access to agriculture and food science is urgent: CGIAR can help

2010-05-21T02:50:00.000-07:00

There is a clear and urgent need to ensure free access to all research findings relating to agriculture and food science. It is on these discoveries that the well-being of the poorest people ultimately depends. It was with interest, therefore, that I came across an item on the Web titled, ‘Cheap dipstick can detect foot and mouth’, as it seemed a valuable development with the potential for immediate impact in developing regions. I found the reference on the SciDevNews website (see here) and clicked on the link to the full text. But this was available only on payment of a subscription.

Now that open science and open access to research findings is becoming mainstream, how is it that such information still remains behind barriers that prohibit access by those most in need?

Then by email came a timely letter that was to be sent to the CGIAR organisation encouraging with some urgency that its constituent organisations make all their publications freely available to all through open access. My fellow EPT Trustee, Professor Subbiah Arunachalam, had drafted the message reproduced below and was inviting colleagues prominent in the development of open access to add their names to the letter.

This was an immediate antidote to the irritation I had felt on being blocked a moment before. The message has now been sent to the CGIAR administration for their consideration and it is the fervent hope of its authors that the organisation will consider the purpose for which the CGIAR was originally set up and take steps to implement the recommendations in the letter, namely to join the growing body of prestigious organisations that have mandated open access distribution for all the research publications arising from their funding.

Here is the letter, and EPT urges all CGIAR partners to follow the lead of ICRISAT (see here) and begin the process of making their funded research globally available free of cost. CGIAR’s stated vision is ‘to reduce poverty and hunger, improve human health and nutrition, and enhance ecosystem resilience through high-quality international agricultural research, partnership and leadership’. By requiring open access to this research, they will be taking an essential and immediately achievable step towards realizing their aim.

“Dear Dr Carlos Perez del Castillo/ Dr Kathy Sierra:

About a year ago, on 20 May 2009 to be precise, Dr William D Dar, Director General of ICRISAT sent a Memorandum on Launching of Open Access Model: Digital Access to ICRISAT Scientific Publications to all researchers and students in all locations of ICRISAT [http://openaccess.icrisat.org/MemoOnDAIS.pdf]. In the memorandum Dr Dar had said "Every ICRISAT scientist/author in all locations, laboratories and offices will send a PDF copy of the author's final version of a paper immediately upon receipt of communication from the publisher about its acceptance. This is not the final published version that certain journals provide post-print, but normally the version that is submitted following all reviews and just prior to the page proof."

ICRISAT is the only international agricultural research centre with an OA mandate, and is second among the research and education institutes operating from India, the first being the National Institute of Technology-Rourkela (http://dspace.nitrkl.ac.in/dspace/). ICRISAT publishes a research journal (http://www.icrisat.org/journal/) which is also an open access journal.

Since then is growing fast and the portal now has virtually all the research papers published in recent times, and all the books and learning material produced by ICRISAT researchers.

We believe that it would be great if other CGIAR laboratories could also mandate open access to their research publications. Indeed, it would be a good idea to have a system wide Open Access mandate for CGIAR and to have interoperable OA repositories in each CGIAR laboratory. Such a development would provide a high level of visibility for the work of CGIAR and greatly advance agricultural research. Besides, journals published by CGIAR labs could also be made OA. There are more than 1,500 OA repositories (listed in ROAR and OpenDOAR) and about 5,000 journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Currently over 2050 journals are searchable at article level. Over 390,000 articles are included in the DOAJ service.

The world will soon be celebrating the International Open Access Week [18-24 October 2010] and you may wish to announce the CGIAR OA mandate before then.

As you may be aware, all seven Research Councils of the UK and the National Institutes of Health, USA, have such a mandate in place for research they fund and support. To see the full list of ~220 mandates worldwide, see .

We look forward to seeing an early implementation of open access in all CGIAR labs.

Sincerely,
- Subbiah Arunachalam [Distinguished Fellow, Centre for Internet and Society,Bangalore, India]
- Remi Barre [Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers (CNAM), Paris, France]
- Leslie Chan [University of Toronto at Scarborough, Canada]
- Anriette Esterhuysen [Association for Progressive Communications, Johannesburg, South Africa]
- Jean-Claude Guédon [University of Montreal, Canada]
- Stevan Harnad [Universite du Quebec a Montreal and University of Southampton]
- Neil Jacobs [JISC, UK]
- Heather Joseph [Executive Director, SPARC, USA]
- Barbara Kirsop [Electronic Publishing Trust for Development, UK]
- Heather Morrison [University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada]
- Richard Poynder [Technology journalist, UK]
- T V Ramakrishnan, FRS [Banaras Hindu University and Indian Institute of Science; Former President of the Indian Academy of Sciences]
- Peter Suber [Berkman Fellow, Harvard University; Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College; Senior Researcher, SPARC; Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge]
- Alma Swan [Director, Key Perspectives, UK]
- John Wilbanks [Vice President for Science, Creative commons]
- John Willinsky [Stanford University and University of British Columbia]”

Please send us your OA stories as your contribution to OA week!

2010-04-30T07:08:00.000-07:00

Open Access Week will hit the research communities worldwide from October 18th – 24th, 2010! Here is the OA Week web site that will tell you what is going to happen and what you can do to help.

To spread information to developing and emerging regions on the value of OA to research and economic development we need to make a lot of noise this week. We need to tell others how free access to research, or distribution of their own research through OA, has changed their work or their career for the better.

Here is a request: can you send EPT any stories you can share that show how OA has advanced your work. Has it lead to new contacts? Has it lead to new research partnerships and publications? Has it made you think about the importance of getting your research findings into the global community to help resolve global problems? Has it helped your own career? Has it put your organisation on the global map?

Please tell EPT about any developments that have been brought about by your knowledge or participation in Open Access. Send your stories (no more than 300 words please) to EPT. You can also add short experiences as a Comment to this Blog. We will collate the best stories and make them widely known so that others will be encouraged.

Write to us with your OA-stories and help the progress of research!

FRPAA - another small step for mankind?

2010-04-20T03:10:00.000-07:00

A letter of support for the FRPAA bill from the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development, April 20th 2010

"To whom it may concern:

The reintroduction of the Federal Research Public Access bill, that would ensure free, timely, online access to the published results of research funded by eleven U.S. federal agencies, is a very hopeful development for the vast majority of researchers working in the economically disadvantaged regions of the world. Research institutes operating in developing countries are greatly restricted by their inability to access current research.

Yet we now understand that the major global problems waiting to be addressed and solved through research – climate change and environmental protection; infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, avian and human influenza; agriculture and food science for example - all require international knowledge and collaboration. The free exchange of research findings is critical to resolving the many problems facing mankind.

The increasing awareness and adoption of ‘openness’ in the United States and elsewhere is a hugely promising stance. In research publishing, the Open Access movement is advancing strongly and the introduction of the NIH Public Access Policy mandate, together with those adopted by all UK research councils, the Wellcome Trust and over 200 other major research organisations, including Harvard and MIT (see ROARMAP for a full list) is testament to the natural practice that scientists follow in sharing their findings. This ‘openness’ is mirrored in a number of developing country initiatives (for example in India, the CSIR government agency is successfully running an Open Source Drug Discovery programme), since it not only has benefits for the progress of research, but also demonstrates the research strengths of organisations and has been shown to lead to real economic benefits for countries (see 'The economic implications of alternative publishing models') .

The Electronic Publishing Trust for Development is an international Trust, registered in the UK, that has been working for over a decade to support the free exchange of research findings, not only between developed and developing country researchers, but also by raising the visibility of unique research emanating from the regions where the problems are most keenly experienced. We therefore greatly welcome the reintroduction of the FRPAA bill and know that its adoption would vastly enhance research progress throughout the world.

Barbara Kirsop, Trustee/Secretary
On behalf of the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development
http://www.epublishingtrust.org.uk
Registered Charity Number 1059867"

Good news for agriculture

2010-04-14T08:44:00.000-07:00

The following announcement was made by the Indian Council for Agricultural Research:

"ICAR Journals in Open Access

ICAR has decided to allow open access to its research journals online for the benefit of students, researchers and farmers for free nationally and internationally. The journals namely, Indian Journal of Agricultural Sciences and Indian Journal of Animal Sciences are published monthly by ICAR. The journals will be accessible from the ICAR website from March 2010 onwards.
The Indian Journal of Agricultural Sciences

* Vol 80, No. 4 April 2010
* Vol 80, No. 3 March 2010

The Indian Journal of Animal Sciences

* Vol 80, No. 4 April 2010
* Vol 80, No. 3 March 2010

* News"

Invisible research: a Kenyan story

2010-03-29T06:17:00.000-07:00

A video made by Leslie Chan (Bioline International) of the work of horticulture Professor Mary Abukutsa-Onyango, highlights the continuing problems faced by researchers in the developing world in making their findings available to the global research community. Open access has provided a solution to her publication problems.

There are many such examples of research where open access provides a solution to the current invisibility of valuable findings. See 'Eyes wide shut' below for more on this.

Eyes wide shut?

2010-03-16T11:06:00.000-07:00

A debate is underway among the proponents and gainsayers of open access about the reality of whether OA leads to more citations. I am not over-concerned with citations as they are not the sole indicators of the usage of research output. As one of the contributors has said, there is an ‘invisible college’ within which data, methodology, ideas are shared among researchers via conferences, coffee-breaks, workshops, emails, reports, social networking and other communication devices. While this ‘college’ informs, it is seldom cited.

Another statement made in these exchanges was that ‘open access is a solution looking for a problem’. This stopped me in my tracks, since over the last decade, evidence has been accumulating showing the high level of information imbalance and paucity, especially - but by no means only - in the developing world. And it was for this reason that the EPT and many other initiatives were formed to help resolve the problem. It is indisputable that access to all necessary research findings had not been met in pre-web days. Researchers, we had a problem.

And there is now abundant proof that when publications are made available free of charge, full text downloads are very great indeed. As examples, recent usage of material from the institutional repository of the Universidad de los Andes (ULA), Venezuela, showed 1,404,423 full text downloads in 2009 (most usage from Latin American countries, but approximately a third from the USA). Similarly, usage of journals published in developing countries, and made available through the Bioline International platform, shows full text downloads for 2009 of 4,403,047 (figures adjusted to eliminate web crawlers and robots), usage recorded from both developed and developing country users, making these previously non-OA near-invisible publications international in reach.

Similar high usage figures are replicated by many institutional repositories and open access journals (such as those made available through SciELO), as has been reported many times in this blog. Researchers, particularly in low-bandwidth regions, do not download full text articles unless they need them.

The argument that current research communication meets the needs of international science is quite evidently unsustainable, and the research communities worldwide are vigorously adopting new mechanisms for sharing publications and data. View the global, multilingual work of the eIFL network (see side-bar) for more evidence of the multi-institutional effort being put into circumnavigating knowledge-barriers. The need for reform has long been accepted, but if there is anyone left that still feels there has been and remains no research communication problem it must be a case of ‘eyes wide shut and ears soundproofed’ (Ted Hughes). OA is a well-advanced solution to a well-known problem.

*For information on ULA, Venzuela, see http://epublishingtrust.blogspot.com/2009/12/venezuelas-technology-mecca.html
* For information on Bioline International, see http://www.bioline.org.br

Bookmark this infoKit!

2010-02-24T04:50:00.000-08:00

If you want to set up a Digital Repository at your institute/university that will promote your scholarly output and enable global sharing of research information, look no further than this comprehensive new toolkit, prepared by collaborators within the UK-based Joint Information Systems Committee family. Known as the Digital Repositories infoKit, it provides a vast amount of information, links and advice. It states:

“The Digital Repositories infoKit is a practical 'how to' guide to setting up and running digital repositories. The kit contains information on a broad range of topics running from the initial idea of a digital repository and the planning process, via detailed sections on repository set up and promotion, through to the maintenance and ongoing management of the repository. The main focus is on institutional repositories and the kit reflects current repository community best practice.

This resource has been written for repository administrators. It assumes no prior knowledge of repository matters and, more importantly, assumes no prior technical knowledge. The kit can be used by anyone who needs an introduction to any of the topics covered.”

Congratulations to JISC and its many collaborators for providing this immensely valuable resource, prepared by experts for the benefit of research.

OA in Kenya

2010-02-18T02:42:00.000-08:00

. An important workshop, titled ‘Open Access and the Evolving Scholarly Communication Environment’ has been held in Nairobi, Kenya.

Organised by the Kenyan Libraries and Information Services Consortium, Bioline International and eIFL.net, the workshop’s objective was to discuss how open access can maximise the visibility of research publications and improve the quality, impact and influence of research. Some of the questions discussed were:

- How to disseminate research results in the most efficient way?
- How to showcase the quality of research in universities and research institutions?
- What are the new tools to better measure and manage research in such institutions?
- How to collect and curate the digital outputs?
- How to generate new knowledge from existing findings, enable and encourage collaboration?
- How to bring savings to the higher education sector and better returns on investment?
- What are the key functions for research libraries?

Open access, as a viable solution to existing problems in scholarly communication, is now being debated by governments and publishers and mandated by funding bodies and universities throughout the world. The considerable economic, social and educational benefits to making research outputs available without financial, legal and technical barriers to access, and strategies for collective advocacy of open access to research results, were discussed. Practical sessions included case studies on successful management of open repositories and open access journals, training on how to start, and the best approaches to collaborative promotion of research outputs.

EPT Trustee and associate director of Bioline International, Leslie Chan, was a major contributor and fellow-Trustee, Daisy Ouya, was also present. There are currently 20 African bioscience journals available on an open access basis via Bioline, and 31 African open access institutional repositories, 20 of which are in South Africa.

Happy Birthday to BOAI on Valentine's Day!

2010-02-15T04:21:00.000-08:00

February 14th 2002 was the day on which the Budapest Open Access Initiative was signed. It was the day the possibility of a level playing field for access to published research literature took a big step foreward.

Much has happened since then. For the best review of recent OA events, read Peter Suber's piece, reported here. For those new to Open Access, the Open Society Institute supported website,OASIS is a great place to find out everything about OA.

OAIster returns

2010-02-11T02:37:00.000-08:00

The good news this week is that the OAIster search service, recently moved to WorldCat, is now available once more as a search facility dedicated to OA articles because of the OAI-PMH international protocol associated with all OA material.
Here's the link.

Bookmark this, and use it to locate any OA articles in OA journals or in the >1600 OA repositories.

The OA-Butterfly Effect

2010-01-23T02:44:00.000-08:00

We talk a lot about the importance of sharing publicly funded research, but those working with the under-resourced countries sometimes get frustrated by the never-ending discussions between researchers in the more privileged countries about OA this and OA that, when all we urgently want is OA now.

So I felt a sense of familiarity as I was watching an excellent BBC TV documentary on January 16th, ‘The Secret Life of Chaos’. The presenter, Professor Jim Al-Khalili, reported that a remarkable Russian mathematician and chemist, Boris Belousov (above), had discovered an oscillating chemical reaction (but had been repeatedly rejected publication of his results and was accused of dishonesty). At the same time, Alan Turing was developing the mathematical theories that lead to modelling and computing and ultimately the chaos theory – now commonly referred to by the butterfly effect metaphor. The BBC programme suggested that had Belousov been able to meet and work with Turing, the understanding and applications of the chaos theory could have been advanced spectacularly. And Turing could have vindicated Belousov’s findings. But what would have been a natural and productive cooperation could not take place because of Cold War embargoes.

As I began to get lost in string, rope and chaos theories, my mind suddenly switched to the old question - what were current research communication embargoes doing to retard research progress? What would be the consequence of just a single butterfly wing-flap in, say, Sweden on some new medical development in Peru?

We can never know, but happily the progress of open access is gathering speed - and bravo Italy for providing the news yesterday that 13 of their universities had set up OA repositories and associated mandates for a variety of scholarly output! This brings the total of institutional/funder/departmental/theses mandates to 195 and the number of institutional repositories to 1564. When we can stop counting and when there are no embargoes left to block the exchange of research findings – then the research community can focus its energy on OA this and OA that. We just need OA first.

Posted by Barbara Kirsop

QMed Knowledge Foundation selects EPT paper as 'Article of the Month'

2010-01-05T07:24:00.000-08:00

The QMed Knowledge Foundation, a Trust based in Mumbai, India, has as its mission, "To enable healthcare professionals and institutions in India to exploit the power of technology to get and produce the best of medical information for better patient care and preventive health services."

It recently issued its latest newsletter in which their ‘Article of the Month’ was reported as:

“The chain of communication in health science: from researcher to health worker through open access: Open Medicine 2009 3:111-119, Chan L(1), Arunachalam S(1), Kirsop B(1). The article focuses on the big gap between the large sums of money being spent on health research and the outcome that is expected (better health of people). One of the major reasons for this gap is inadequate access to peer reviewed evidence based research. The article discusses the progress of "Open Access" and future directions. We would add that along with access, training in searching information resources requires major attention. Otherwise it will be akin to having a gigantic library and not knowing how to identify the best resources in it!”

(1) EPT Trustees

A New Year's present

2010-01-03T04:29:00.000-08:00

Peter Suber's January 2010 Open Access Newsletter provides a comprehensive and wonderfully encouraging report on all open access events throughout 2009. This is not only the best present we could wish for, but it provides all those working towards the free and open access to research findings with a promise of exciting developments in 2010. Things are at last looking up for the research communities in developing countries.

Follow the progress of open access in OAN by clicking here.

EPT raises developing country needs in international fora

2009-12-23T05:46:00.000-08:00

The EPT has written in support of two initiatives to consider working towards open science and open access to research findings. The US Office of Science and Technology Policy has initiated a discussion forum, requesting information on optimal procedures to advance this development, and there has been a call for input to a petition to the German Parliament on open access. These can be seen at:

- OSTP, and

- German Parliament, pasted on Eberhard Hilf’s blog -

The intention of these interventions has been to ensure that the needs of the research communities in developing countries is highlighted. As the previous two postings to this EPT blog have shown, the understanding and incorporation of open access policies and the establishment of repositories and journals is moving ahead with some strength in these regions. This is largely due to the work of such organisations as the eIFL network, Bioline International, SciELO, MedKnow publications and many others. We hope that the important efforts of these organisations continues to accelerate in 2010 – and EPT wishes them every success.

Botswana, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Mozambique - keep up everyone!

2009-12-21T08:44:00.000-08:00

Developing and emerging countries are going from strength to strength, thanks very much to the great work of the eIFL network (newsletter on right of this blog). From here you can read a report of a seminar on ‘Open access: maximizing research quality and impact’ held during open Access week in Latvia.

In his opening address, Prof. Indrikis Muiznieks, University of Lithuania (LU)’s vice rector said, ‘It was stressed, that today’s science and research are dynamic and collaborative and it is important to sustain the communication processes, rather than simply archive research results in the form of a single journal article.’ He said that LU is looking forward to exploring the benefits of open access as a viable solution to existing problems in scholarly communication.

During the seminar Tetiana Yaroshenko, University Librarian and Vice President for IT, National University of Kyiv Mohyla Аcademy, Ukraine, presented the governmental and institutional open access policy landscape and the collective actions of universities and libraries to promote open access. She described the implementation of a national open access mandate – open access to research funded by the state budget of Ukraine is required by the Law of Ukraine “On the principles of Developing Information Society in Ukraine in 2007-2015”. To implement this mandate, the Vernadsky National library of Ukraine created a full text registry of 965 journals [3] and a DSpace repository.

The seminar brought together 78 researchers, research managers and policy-makers, journal editors and publishers, librarians, and ICT specialists to discuss the latest developments of the open access movement and to debate how to raise the visibility of research outputs from Latvian universities and research organisations, and how to build their capacities in global knowledge sharing. To read the full report, click here.

Furthermore, the first open access repositories have been launched in Belarus, Botswana and Mozambique. As the eIFL newsletter says: Congratulations to the Fundamental Library of the Belarusian State University with the first open access institutional repository in Belarus – BSU Digital Library, to the University of Botswana with the University of Botswana Research, Innovation and Scholarship Archive and to the Centro de Formação Jurídica e Judiciária, Universidade Eduardo Mondlane and Universidade Politécnica with the national Mozambican Repository! Aissa Issak, eIFL country coordinator for Mozambique and coordinator of Mozambican Repository SABER, has sent us a detailed account on how the project got started and developed until it was officially launched on November 4, 2009. Please read her full story.

Furthermore – again – the Republic of Moldova published an Open Access Declaration.

To read all the OA events that have taken place around the developing world, click on the eIFL Newsletter. As Iryna Kuchma states in the eIFL report, “Deep interest in Open Access was in evidence, as tens of thousands of individuals attended live events, logged onto Web casts, shared videos, and participated in contests calling on stakeholders to express their support for Open Access through creative uses of digital resources. “

Many congratulations to all concerned and may 2010 keep up this breathtaking speed of development!

Venezuela's 'Technology Mecca'

2009-12-14T03:51:00.000-08:00

Lesson from Venezuela

An article describing the establishment and progress over a decade of the Institutional Repository of the Universidad de Los Andes (IR-ULA) in Venezuela is of interest to all organisations in the developing world (or elsewhere) planning the establishment of an IR. The article provides guidelines/recommendations based on ULA's experience.

The ULA, a 200-year old, geographically isolated university, is now considered to be a ‘Technology Mecca’ in Venezuela. Starting in 2000, the IR now holds some 19,000 records and has attracted 40,000,000 visits to its portal. See here for statistics of usage.

According to an UNDP report, ‘. . . . this small town can be considered an innovation territory where signs of technology appropriation can be detected and where ICT are statistically significant within the Latin America context’. It is clear that the early acceptance of open access has put the ULA on the world map and provided global recognition for its research activities.

Note: the ULA web site is in Spanish, the statistics pages in Spanish/English.

OA and Copenhagen

2009-12-07T07:40:00.000-08:00

Copenhagen has begun and the world watches and waits. But anyone who has chaired a committee of strong-minded people following different agendas will understand very well the problems ahead.

But one thing seems clear. If we are to accumulate all possible scientific knowledge about climate change, biodiversity conservation, engineering progress, social consequences – and do this with some urgency - and at the same time develop essential practical solutions to change current culture to a more sustainable one, then we must share knowledge.

The mutual exchange of information is something to which all nations can agree and work towards together. So it is to be hoped that open access advocates will be raising this important and eminently do-able building block to achieving global answers to the problems we face.

It is very good that SciDevNet have a Copenhagen blog to report activities of interest to the scientific communities. If there are other groups in Copenhagen, it is to be hoped they will use every opportunity to raise the issue of open access to essential information. This is something we can do.

Note that there is a link to SciDevNet from this blog. Please add links to other information/Copenhagen resources as a comment to this post.

A new article and a new service of interest to developing countries

2009-11-30T09:38:00.000-08:00

Libraries and ‘the Depot’ helping access for developing countries

## An interesting article titled, ‘Be Creative, Determined, and Wise: Open Library Publishing and the Global South’ discusses the many issues affecting access to information by developing countries. Matthew Baker, in a feature article in Information Today, discusses how libraries can address the problems facing the ‘information divide’ - internet infrastructure, language, political/economic instability, cultural factors, censorship . . . Matthew Baker says: “As libraries continue to work on opening access to scientific and scholarly research, and as they assume more and more the roles, responsibilities, and capacities of publication, they are strategically placed to help significantly reduce the global digital information divide. There is much work to be done. By keeping the important ethical and social justice priorities of the open access movement at the heart of the evolving publication roles of libraries, we can bring the best instincts and practices of libraries to bear on this important issue. Librarians know this about OA. We love it. It gets us all fired up.” See here.

## No institutional repository? No worry. Authors from any country in the world can now deposit their published articles in the ‘DEPOT’ service. Previously restricted to the UK, all authors can now benefit from open access visibility straight away. If they later want to return their articles to their own IR, then that can be done.

Based at the University of Edinburgh and supported by JISC, the Depot explains that it provides two main services:
• a deposit service for researchers worldwide without an institutional repository in which to deposit their papers, articles, and book chapters (e-prints).
• a re-direct service which alerts depositors to more appropriate local services if they exist.
“The first time a researcher visits the Depot we will automatically check with OpenDOAR, the registry for open access repositories, to find a more appropriate local repository. If none exists then the author will be invited to deposit their research in the Depot. The Depot is OAI-compliant allowing deposited e-prints to be 'harvested' by search services, and other repositories, giving them instant global visibility.”

So don’t wait for your institute to set up its own repository – let everyone have access to your publications now, go deposit in the Depot! [But your institute should have its own IR too as it is getting left behind – now over 1500 have been set up around the world - and there are so many institutional benefits to be gained.]

OA priority

2009-11-13T04:54:00.000-08:00

Revisiting OA Priorities

The only purpose of open access to research literature is to provide the widest possible distribution of the latest research findings to the global community and to enable the development of new knowledge for the benefit of mankind. And the prime need for this international sharing of research knowledge is the increasing urgency to solve the planet’s problems – climate change, new infectious diseases (swine flu, avian flu, malaria . . .), other diseases, hunger, poverty, drought, flooding . . . the list is endless.

Now, we are able to take advantage of the Internet and its world wide reach and make essential research available through this means. But online distribution is not enough since the regions facing the gravest problems cannot afford commercial access to all the information they need. So free-of-cost access is also needed, coupled with the freedom to copy and share the content.

Now that we have the infrastructure (in much of the world), we have watched as two means of providing access have emerged: 1) to deposit copies of refereed published articles in open access institutional repositories (or linked centralised repositories) or 2) to publish in open access journals. As these new paradigms for academic knowledge-sharing get underway, advocates of the twin tracks are developing many new supporting applications, establishing standards, setting up networks, providing statistical packages and much else to improve their services.

This is all wonderful, but the promotion of the two parallel mechanisms is confusing newcomers and creating divisions in the OA community. While acknowledging that both routes (known now as the green and gold tracks respectively) are commendable, it seems very clear that the fastest route to sharing essential research has to be through the establishment of institutional repositories (IRs). Why? Because they are low cost (free software), quick to set up (minimal sysop time, much free online and offline help available), can be established without the need to set up new bodies (editorial boards, publishing partners, refereeing procedures/participating referees) and finance them, provide global access wherever the articles were published and, most importantly, the author communities can continue to follow existing procedures – publishing for free in their favourite journals. For more information on all aspects of OA – academic, technical and policy – visit the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS).

As we know, all that authors must do to encompass OA and benefit from global distribution of their publications, is ‘the few key strokes’ needed to deposit copies of their accepted articles in their own IRs, thus complying with the steadily increasing number of institutional/funder mandates. But OA-deniers say that progress is very slow and authors are not complying with deposit requirements. So I have checked the numbers of articles deposited in the IRs in two developing countries, India and South Africa, and in the UK.

Totalling the number of deposits in the ROAR database on November 11th 2009, the following were recorded:

India 47,809 deposits
South Africa 22,222 deposits
UK 718,530 deposits

In these three countries alone, therefore, approaching 800,000 deposits have been made. And as there are now >1500 IRs registered in the ROAR database today, you can work out that already significant steps have been taken to free the world’s research literature. And while it is true that not every deposit will be a full text research article (there will be theses, reports, presentations too), all this information is important and now free to all, to be built on and used as the academic communities require. But more needs to be done.

So what are today’s OA priorities?

The globally connected community of research workers, communications specialists and their financial backers needs to stop a moment and think about the priorities for OA’s future.

Is the priority to protect the quality of research publications?
Or to advance the careers of researchers?
Or to promote the stature of research institutes?
Or to help funding organisations assess the value of their investments?
Or to ensure the continuity of journals?

While all these are very important and greatly helped by open access - and ways to achieve them are rightly being discussed - they are not what open access is primarily for. [Nor is it a priority to protect the profits of the commercial publishing industry, which has benefited from free material for their journals, free refereeing and free professional effort on editorial boards]. To repeat – open access is solely to advance research and allow new knowledge to be shared, developed and used for the future benefit of mankind.

For economically poor countries, the development of the fastest, lowest cost route to open access is a ‘no brainer’. It’s a major priority. The developing world urgently needs the establishment and filling of IRs right now. Without a strong research base, the poorer countries will forever depend on donations and will be unable to contribute their essential and unique knowledge to the world’s information pool.

+++++++++++++++++++

Since starting to write this post a comprehensive article appeared in the Times Higher Education supplement, together with a Leader on the same topic.
Coincidentally, many of the points raised in this blog have been clearly and well aired in the THES piece, so you may find it interesting to link to the article and the appended comments. Of associated importance are the open access journals published in the developing countries, for example SciELO, Bioline International, MedKnow Publications and many others, filling the S to N knowledge gap and bringing researchers in these regions into the international research community.

This posting represents the view of the author, Barbara Kirsop, and is not posted on behalf of the EPT.

NISCAIR celebrates OA week!

2009-11-05T04:10:00.000-08:00

The National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources, India, celebrated Open Access Week by holding a workshop on open access journal publishing.

Acting Director of NISCAIR, Dr B C Kashyap, in his welcome address, highlighted the importance of globalizing S&T knowledge and announced that the 17 peer-reviewed journals published by NISCAIR are all made open access through the NISCAIR national open access repository. The repository now holds 5757 articles, thus making a major contribution to the distribution of essential research information.

The workshop was based on the Open Journal System, an open source publishing software, and was attended by five CSIR laboratories that publish peer-reviewed journals. The participants were NEERI-Nagpur, CDRI-Lucknow, CIMAP- Lucknow, CFTRI-Mysore and SERC-Chennai. Mr. Sukhdev Singh, Technical Director, National Informatics Centre and Mr. S. B. Burde, Scientist, NISCAIR were the faculty for the workshop. All stages of Editorial processing from online submission of manuscripts to its final hosting for open access were covered in the workshop.

So many congratulations are due to the CSIR, and NISCAIR in particular, for leading the way in providing open access to this important body of research information - and crucially by providing training to other CSIR colleagues!

Poet's Corner

2009-10-28T04:15:00.000-07:00

Among all the important OA Week activities, there was some fun too. Here is the winner of the SHERPA Haiku ‘Spirit of Open Access’ Competition:

Set your research free
As flowers offer nectar
To the passing bee

Congratulations to Miggie Pickton, University of Northampton, UK!

And here are a few of the runners-up:

Like birds, authors' rights
fly away from their control
never to return
Nancy Stimson, University of California, San Diego

A candle under
a bushel is wasted light
try open access
Rob Szarka, szarka.org

Empowerment comes
To those who share their knowledge
With the world beyond
Allison Brown, University of Otago, New Zealand

Enlightenment is
The addition of full text
To metadata
Neil Stewart, LSE, UK

Opening access
connected and well-informed
research moves forward
Jon Mason, InterCog

The locked door opens
And brilliant autumn sunlight
Pours into the room.
Padraig Manning, HSE Ireland

Help barriers fall
Repositories blossom
An open age dawns
Jessie and Tony Hey, University of Southampton and Microsoft Research

Hard discoveries
Should not perish, closed, within
a domain price-locked.
Hélène LeBlanc, Rogers Communications

OA is worldwide
bringing scholars together
and spreading their words
Nancy Stimson, University of California, San Diego

In the autumn rains
open access means no trudge
to the library
Kate Hodgson, University of Saskatchewan, Canada

And another that wasn’t in the runners-up list:

Gold leaves float down

secured in OA silos –

research advances

And a limerick to encourage deposit in IRs:

A geneticist working in Lima

Found a gene to zap helicobacter.

He made it OA

And before you could say

Jack was made a Distinguished Professor.

Enjoy!

OPEN ACCESS WEEK IS HERE!

2009-10-19T06:21:00.000-07:00

This week sees a great number of activities taking place around the world to celebrate the growth of open access to refereed published research findings!

Here is a first list of events as recorded in Open Access News. Please make sure your celebrations are made known to everyone - those taking place in developing and emerging regions could be posted as comments to this posting as well as on the OAN/OATP site.

Have a great time and may OA Week see a great surge forward towards providing a level playing field to researchers everywhere!

Image from Seedmagazine.com

African universities to get greatly improved bandwidth

2009-10-12T03:09:00.000-07:00

This was announced in Russell Southwood’s recent Balancing Act newsletter, October 9th 2009:

“African universities will buy 60 Gb of bandwidth and set up a continental network

Almost unnoticed African universities have come together to sort out their bandwidth problems in the new era of fibre. In April 2010, European NREN Dante will start to implement with eastern Africa’s UbuntuNet Alliance, a continental network to link up African universities with plentiful bandwidth to their colleagues across the globe. On 1 November West and Central Africa will set up its own network organisation to join the process. African universities currently spend an estimated US$1.4 million and are destined to become important players in network development.

15 million euros from the European Commission will go via European National Research Network (NREN) Dante to buy connectivity for African universities with a start date for implementation of April 2010. A 25% contribution will either come from the African Union or national Governments. According to UbuntuNet Alliance’s Tusu Tusubira:”Dante will buy the cross-border connectivity and UbuntuNet may get to operate it. UbuntuNet wants to be part of the implementation and to develop the opportunity.”

In advance of this happening, National Research Networks (NRENs) have been buying their own capacity in considerable quantity at low prices that acknowledge universities are a different type of customer. . . .

South African NREN TENET got the ball rolling by buying an STM64 from Seacom, which is just short of 10 Gbps. .. . . As an independent cable provider Seacom understood the importance of the university market as an “anchor tenant” early whereas some of the other telco-initiated cable providers were keener on universities buying individually at higher prices. As Dunacan Martin, CEO of TENET tells it:”Seacom has been very supportive.”

”By the end of year, the South African research and education backbone SANRen will (be) connected and the full bandwidth can be delivered to the member universities. ”

. . . . However all is not plain sailing as the capacity will have to cross borders to supply universities in neighbouring countries. The problem as Martin has discovered is as follows:”Cross border connectivity prices are controlled by unpublished agreements between incumbent operators on either side of the border. One of the negotiating partners, Telkom, said it would drop its prices to accommodate us but the other country’s telco would not agree”.

On the West and Central side of the continent, the Co-ordinator of Research and Education Networking of the Association of African Universities, Boubakar Barry has been the moving force behind getting an UbuntuNet Alliance-like structure together that will be launched on 1 November.

Barry emphasises the unique nature of universities as customers: ”Providers should not consider the Higher Education and Research institutions as normal customers. They are critical for the development of Africa. It’s now very important for them to be able to part of the game with this type of infrastructure for global academic collaborations. . . . The same rules cannot apply to Higher Education and Research Institutions that apply to other operators. It’s a public good. If you train and educate people, it benefits the private sector as they need highly trained engineers. Networked universities will provide them.”

So, a major step forward, a recognition of the value to economies of research connectivity, but a few hurdles to be crossed on the road to equality of access to global research. For the full article click here.

Open Access Week events!

2009-10-03T03:51:00.000-07:00

Open Access Week (19-23 October 2009) is on the horizon and there are many activities planned to mark the occasion. For a full list see. But here are a few activities of special interest to EPT people:

- A recent announcement from the NECOBELAC project (European and Latin American Country collaboration in open access dissemination of information for the protection of public health)is of interest. A workshop is to be held in Rome in October and a leaflet giving further information about the programme and speakers has just been produced – available from here.

- A UK competition has been launched to find the institutional repository that has made the highest number of full text deposits during OA Week! Only eligible for UK IRs, but what a good idea to get those IRs filled! See. Other countries could copy the idea and if you haven’t organized an OA week event yet, this is an easy and very worthwhile way to do so.

- The formal constitution of COAR: the Confederation of Open Access
Repositories is scheduled to take place in Open Access Week 2009. See. An outcome from the DRIVER infrastructure, COAR is a community-driven approach, where institutions can determine how they want their repositories to be deployed. The action plan is directed towards international organisational support for Open Access in research infrastructures around the globe. The EU’s DRIVER programme has lead to a growing number of international developments supporting the exchange of research information between the EU member states and other regions, see for example NECOBELAC, above.

Good wishes for a happy and fruitful OA Week!