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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

  

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

OA-Advocacy support from EIFL

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."

Some of the brilliant highlights of Open Access Week

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.

Good advice from Mozambique

“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.

Rich OA material from two meetings in Sweden

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!

Steady progress of IRs in developing countries

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.

Eyes wide shut?

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

OA in Kenya

. 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.

eIFL countries continue to make impressive OA progress!

Thanks to eIFL, we learn that 26 rectors of universities in the Ukraine endorsed the Olvia Declaration that includes academic freedom, university autonomy and the role of science and education for sustainable development.

Academic freedom includes open access to research information through the development of open repositories and open access journals, enabling the free communication of researchers in the Ukraine with peers around the world.
In Article 2.11 of the Action Plan on implementing the Olvia declaration, it is stated:
“To practice open access to knowledge Universities and research organizations should:
• develop institutional polices and strategies on open access (free and unrestricted access to full text peer reviewed research results), provide access to, search and usage of the above mentioned works by the faculty to every internet user to increase scientific, social and economic impact of the research;
• launch and develop open institutional repositories and open access journals;
• encourage open use of this information for research and education.”

This follows on from the Belgorod Declaration to stimulate and support open access to scientific knowledge and cultural heritage endorsed by 10 rectors of universities of the CIS countries in May 2009, as reported in this blog on July 10th.

eIFL and its partner colleagues in the Ukraine are greatly to be congratulated for achieving this important step towards global research communication.

Photo from eIFL newsletter, with thanks.

OA developments in CIS countries and South Africa

eIFL.net, with the help of the Open Society Institute, continues to make steady progress in the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) countries and in other eIFL countries with regard to open access and policy developments. The recent eIFL Newsletter highlights a number of major developments:
- A new Lithuanian law on science requires online access for publicly-funded research took effect on May 12, 2009 and was made possible through the commitment and hard work of the Lithuanian Research Library Consortium;
- In Poland, Krzysztof Gulda, Director of the Department of Strategy and Development of Science at the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, speaking at the conference Open Educational Resources in Poland on April 23, declared the interest of the Ministry in introducing open science models in Poland, as part of the current reform of the scientific system. In particular, he declared that the Ministry is considering introducing an open mandate for publicly funded scientific content;
- Implementation of the Belgorod Declaration on open access to scientific knowledge and cultural heritage was endorsed by 10 rectors in Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine. And on May 28 Belgorod State University presented its digital repository (dspace.bsu.edu.ru) followed by the V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University launching its digital repository eKhNUIR (dspace.univer.kharkov.ua) to implement the action plan of the Belgorod declaration on open access to scientific knowledge and cultural heritage at the university area of border regions of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine for 2008-2013;
- In Ukraine, libraries advocated open access and the implementation of the national open access mandate and a new thematic digital repository –the Central and Eastern European Marine Repository. More than 150 Ukrainian University librarians endorsed the Open Access to knowledge statement on May 21 at the International conference “Libraries of the higher education institutions in the context of higher education modernisation” that took place in Sevastopol, Ukraine.
To implement the Open Access Mandate (open access to research funded from the state budget of Ukraine introduced in the Law of Ukraine On the principles of Developing Information Society in Ukraine in 2007-2015) the Vernadsky National library of Ukraine created a registry of 726 journals. Full text articles of 346 journals (starting from 2008) are already deposited here.
And the library of the Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas (IBSS), Ukraine, launched CEEMaR (Central and Eastern European Marine Repository) – a thematic digital repository covering the marine, brackish and freshwater environments and providing access to papers produced by the staff of the ECET institutes in Bulgaria, Poland, Russia and Ukraine;
- And in South Africa, the first African open access institutional mandate at the University of Pretoria and a new repository at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology was registered. On May 22, Monica Hammes registered the first African open access mandate of the University of Pretoria, South Africa: www.eprints.org/openaccess.

More information about all these developments is available from
eIFL-OA