EPT Award for indviduals in developing countries working for OA

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.

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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.

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*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

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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

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.

Calling all OA authors!!

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

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!

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!