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

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

NISCAIR celebrates OA week!

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!

Subbiah Arunachalam on Open Access in India

Two EPT Trustees discuss open access in India during the Delhi workshop, reported earlier.


Subbiah Arunachalam on Open Access in India from Leslie Chan on Vimeo.

OA between Caribbean hurricanes

OA between two hurricanes

An InterAcademy Panel workshop on ‘Open Access to Scientific Literature and other Digital Scientific Information Resources in Central America and the Caribbean: Focus on Education and Health for Sustainable Development’ was organized by the Cuban Academy of Science – between hurricanes. In spite of weather worries, speakers arrived and everything took place in excellent order, organized seemingly near-single handed by Alejandro Caballero de Rivero of the Cuban Academy. Alejandro has my vote for the Olympic Gold Medal in the sport of Workshop Organisation. The programme is available from http://www.academiaciencias.cu/English_1/Working%20information/Events/talleropenaccess2008en.pdf, and further information will be posted on the site in due course, so bookmark this site to receive details of the presentations.

My impression is that many of the Caribbean participants are well informed about OA and very anxious to become part of the OA exchange of research information, but are struggling to organize how to manage this within their own research structures. Who will do it? Inter-departmental communication is not always well established yet – not only in Cuba, but also in Nicaragua, Dominican Republic and other Caribbean countries. Participants sometimes knew more about international OA developments than about what is taking place across town. Incoming speakers and participants from more OA-advanced countries such as Brazil, Colombia and Chile were able to provide a lot of relevant information and contacts, which it is hoped will accelerate progress.

There were presentations on how the Creative Commons License works, how institutional repositories work, how the InterAcademy works, what is underway in the different Cuban ministries. The research networks infrastructure progress was described and OA policy developments in Brazil, as well as progress in the SciELO e-publishing service. Outside the formal programme there were short presentations on the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook, an OSI-supported initiative to bring together in a single resource ‘everything you will ever want to know about OA’, with new and existing initiatives being contributed by experts around the world. Watch http://eprints.utsc.utoronto.ca/oasis/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=43&Itemid=94 for developments over the coming months. Additionally a short presentation was made on the EU’s next DRIVER programme (called OverDriver) which is aimed at exporting the DRIVER institutional repository services beyond the EU to enable exchange of research information between the EU and researchers in other regions of the world.

The IAP will be working on projects to support OA developments, following a final discussion on needs and opportunities.

The arrival of the hotel parrot in the beautiful tropical atrium at coffee breaks was much appreciated and led to interesting conversations.

OA Workshop in Cuba

International Workshop for Open Access to Scientific Literature and other Digital Scientific Information Resources in Central America and the Caribbean: Focus on Education and Health for Sustainable Development

This workshop is part of the InterAcademy Panel on International issues (IAP) Program on Promoting Access to and Use of Digital Knowledge Resources, focusing on countries with developing and transitional economies, and follows a previous IAP initiative on Access to Scientific Information in Developing Countries.

So within the framework of this Program, the Academy of Sciences of Cuba is organizing the international workshop. It will take place on September 3 to 4, 2008, at the Palco Hotel, Havana, Cuba. It will be organized into nine sessions, each one led by a chair and a designated rapporteur. Sessions will cover international trends in open access and use of digital scientific information and opportunities for sustainable development. Infrastructure, management, technical and copyright issues will be addressed.

The initial announcement can be found on the Academy of Science of Cuba web site, in both English and Spanish, see:

http://www.academiaciencias.cu/English/pages/ntrabajo/Eventos/evento.asp?id=22

http://www.academiaciencias.cu/paginas/ntrabajo/Eventos/evento.asp?id=22

Details of the programme are now available by clicking on the PDF link at the bottom of the announcement.

Workshop on Electronic Publishing and Open Access, Bangalore

The Bangalore workshop held on 2-3 November 2006, was convened to bring together policy-makers and research scientists from major developing countries to agree a path forward towards adopting full Open Access to publicly-funded research publications.

A key output of this meeting was the development of a model National Open Access policy for Developing countries. Read more about this at: http://www.ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/OAworkshop2006/