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 by numbers - getting the sums right

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

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

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

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)

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

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.