EIFL celebrates Open Access Week 2011

Fifth annual event draws broad global participation, highlights deep community commitment to open access

Open Access Week, the annual event celebrating the global movement towards open access to research and scholarship, kicked off for the fifth time on Monday, October 24. Coordinated by SPARC and organized by more than 2,000 advocates in countries around the world, the event provided an opportunity to learn about the benefits of open access, share new ideas and strategies, and inspire wider participation in establishing open access as the norm in scholarly communication.

This year, EIFL Open Access (OA) Programme started Open Access Week 2011 with a presentation at the webinar "Knowledge Management: Open Digital Educational Resources and Archives" hosted at the International Academy of Business and New Technologies (Russia).

To help support local programming we organized:

• EIFL-OA – BioMed Central online workshop Open Access Publishing in Africa;
• EIFL-FOSS and EIFL-OA Themed Week on Open Access Publishing with Open Journal System;
• A conversation about open access at University of Glasgow for the institutions considering open access policies and planning to embed their repositories withing institutional processes and demonstrate their values for faculty members and students. 

We also contributed to:

• Duraspace five-part series DSpace in Africa: Growing Open Access to Knowledge and Culture, that looked at open access repository development in 12 African countries: DSpace in Africa: Botswana, Ethiopia, and Ghana; DSpace in Africa: Kenya and Malawi, DSpace in Africa: Mozambique, Senegal, DSpace in Africa: Sudan, South Africa and DSpace in Africa: Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe;
• doiSerbia– one of more than 30 compelling stories from across Europe commissioned by Knowledge Exchange and collected by Michelle Pauli to show open access in action.
• A special issue of EBIB Bulletin Otwarta nauka i edukacja (Open Science and Education) (Editor: Bożena Bednarek-Michalska) with an article Polityka i strategie otwartego dostępu. Zalecenia dla twórców polityk uczelnianych (Open Access Policies and Strategies: Recommendations for Policy Makers) written by Iryna Kuchma, EIFL-OA Programme Manager.

Berlin Declaration

We encouraged institutions from EIFL partner countries to sign the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and the Humanities during Open Access Week and before the Berlin 9 Meeting and Khazar University (Xəzər Universitəsi, Azerbaijan), Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (Ghana), Lithuanian Research Library Consortium, National University of Lesotho, Universidade Pedagógica Moçambique, University of Belgrade (Serbia) and Makerere University (Uganda) joined over 340 leading international research, scientific, and cultural institutions from around the world that have signed the Berlin Declaration.

OA Week across EIFL partner countries

Read about OA Week activities in 32 EIFL partner countries (60% increase from Open Access Week 2010): 

• Azerbaijan
• Belarus 
• Botswana
• China 
• Egypt 
• Estonia
• Ethiopia 
• Ghana 
• Kenya 
• Latvia
• Lesotho
• Lithuania 
• Macedonia  
• Mali 
• Moldova 
• Mongolia 
• Mozambique 
• Nigeria 
• Poland event and OA e-learning course
• Russia 
• Serbia 
• Slovenia 
• Sudan 
• Tanzania 
• Uganda 
• Ukraine  
• Zimbabwe

For updates from Malawi, Nepal, Senegal, Thailand and Zambia check the members profile at the Open Access Week social network openaccessweek.org

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