The winners of EIFL call for proposals: Open access advocacy campaigns

Following the success of last year's grant competition (see EIFL-OA case studies), the EIFL-OA programme invited new proposals for national or institutional open access advocacy campaigns to reach out to research communities. Over 40 proposals were received from 24 countries. We thank everyone who sent an application.

Funding was granted to 11 projects in Africa, Asia, and Europe: six projects in Africa (in Ghana, Kenya, Sudan, Uganda and Zimbabwe), one project in Asia (in Nepal) and four projects in Europe (Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova and Serbia). The projects will be implemented from June to November 2012. At the end of the projects, case studies will be written illustrating activities, advocacy strategies, successes and lessons learnt so that libraries everywhere can benefit. Congratulations to the grantees, and we look forward to successful projects!

National open access advocacy campaigns

Country: Belarus
Grantee: Republican Research-and-Production Unitary Enterprise "Diatech”
Project title: Belarusian national  open access  website (www.openaccess.by) as a focal point for advocacy campaigns to reach out to research communities
Summary: The main objectives of the project are to create a nation-wide community site to showcase and support communication and collaboration across universities and scholarly societies involved in open access movement; support coordination of collaboration within and across different stakeholders; promote sharing information and expertise on open access;  launch an OJS (Open Journal Systems) portal. Project partners: National Library of Belarus, special session of BelCoLib (Belarusian Council of Libraries on Information  Cooperation), Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics.

Country: Kenya
Grantee: Kenya Libraries and Information Services Consortium (KLISC)
Project title:  Knowledge without boundaries: Advocacy campaign in Kenya for open access and institutional repositories
Summary: The project activities include hosting meetings/workshops to advocate for open access policies to the top level managers/policy makers, librarians, researchers, postgraduate students, authors and editors. Starting from June a team of local experts in DSpace repository software will be visiting KLISC member institutions and assist them in installation, configuration, customization and population of their open access repositories. Project partners: University of Nairobi, Medical Students Association of Kenya (MSAKE) and Kenya Education Network (KENET).

Country: Lithuania
Grantee: Kaunas University of Technology
Project title: Open access from the perspective of young researchers
Summary: The project will organize series of workshops about open access publishing, open access repositories, open access policies, open peer-reviewing, research evaluation. Project partners: the Lithuanian Society of Young Researchers (LSYR), the Association of Lithuanian Serials and the Lithuanian Research Library Consortium.

Country: Nepal
Grantee: Nepal Library and Information Consortium (NELIC)
Project title: Central open access repository in Nepal
Summary: The project will bring together the research community to make them aware of open access by organising workshops/meetings and distributing information leaflets. The proposed project also seeks to build a repository of research work from and on Nepal. Project partners: The Social Science Baha and Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya.

Country: Sudan
Grantee: Faculty of Science, University of Khartoum
Project title: Open access advocacy at Sudan higher education institutions: national level (SudHENL)
Summary: Building on the successes of last year's project (DSpace@ScienceUofK), this new project will extend the DSpace@ScienceUofK to become the University’s open access institutional repository and will advocate for open access at other higher education Sudanese institutions using the Sudanese Universities Information Network (SUIN) platform, which is the national research and education network in Sudan composed of 37 governmental and private universities and institutions. Project partners: SUIN, Sudanese University Libraries Consortium including Neelain University library and Sudan University for Science and Technology (SUST) library; the project is supported by the Sudanese Ministry of Communication.

Country: Uganda
Grantee: Consortium of Uganda University Libraries (CUUL)
Project title: Promoting the adoption of campus-based, faculty-driven open access policies
Summary: Through hosting workshops and events among CUUL member institutions, the programme aims to promote the adoption of campus-based, faculty-driven open access policies. Partners: Makerere University Library and Makerere University Student's Guild.

Country: Zimbabwe
Grantee: Zimbabwe University Libraries Consortium (ZULC)
Project title: Capacity building for the adoption and implementation of open access policies/repositories in Zimbabwe
Summary: ZULC seeks to embark on a national open access initiative that involves universities, Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education and research organizations in Zimbabwe. The objective is to empower them in open access advocacy, open access policy creation and implementation in  universities.

Institutional open access advocacy campaigns

Country: Ghana
Grantee: Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) – Library
Project title:  Promoting open access through the implementation of OJS (Open Journal Systems) for KNUST research  community
Summary: The objective of the project is to create awareness of the benefits of using the OJS in the journal publishing process in the KNUST research community and providing open access to KNUST published journals. Project partners: Department of Publishing Studies in KNUST collaborating with   the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and the Ghana Book Publishers Association; KNUST Journal of Science and Technology; KNUST Business School online Journal; KNUST Law Journal; Building and Road Research Journal; FORIG Journal; Journal of Horticulture and Agric and Food Science Journal.

Country: Kenya
Grantee: Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT)
Project title: JKUAT Institutional Repository
Summary: The project will be implementing the JKUAT Open Access Policy and will design strategies to populate the JKUAT open access institutional repository.

Country: Moldova
Grantee: Library Association of Moldova
Project title: Open Access – an important element of optimizing the scientific and academic communication
Summary: The project is aimed at developing and approving an open access policy at the Academy of Economic Studies (AESM), promoting open access, launching open access repository, training and encouraging other universities and research organizations in the country to follow AESM's approach.

Country: Serbia
Grantee: University Library "Sveroyar Markovic", University of Belgrade
Project title: Promotion of open access at the University of Belgrade
Summary: The project goals are to promote open access and encourage populating newly established Digital Archive of the University of Belgrade, PHAIDRA. 

EIFL-OA programme will provide support to the advocacy work during implementation of the projects (more information about EIFL-OA call for proposals is here).

This programme is supported by the Information Programme of Open Society Foundations.

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