Case studies of open access initiatives for access to information in developing countries

Case Studies of Open Access Initiatives in Developing Countries Helena Asamoah-Hassan University Librarian , KNUST at the 2nd BioMed Africa Open Access Conference,25-26 October 2011,at KNUST, Kumasi , Ghana

Outline
Overview of Open Access
Open Access Initiatives in the developing world
Initiatives of EIFL
Initiatives in Africa
Initiatives in Ghana
Initiatives at KNUST
Suggestions/Recommendations

Overview of Open Access (1)
Some initiatives started in the 1990s.
BioMed Central with PLoS (Public Library of Science) were the leaders.
HINARI, OARE, AGORA,DATAD,AJOL are all OA initiatives.
Leading supporters of OA met in December 2001 under the auspices of OSI in Budapest. Main outcome of the meeting was the Budapest Open Access Initiative(BOAI) which is a statement of principle, strategy and commitment( www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml )
Since the release of BOAI in 2002,several institutions and organisations have given support to the OA initiative.

Overview of Open Access (2)
Developments in science and technology research bring us closer to the reduction of poverty and disease.
Scientists in developing countries have limited access to other research results published in subscription journals.
OA publishing is the answer to the unavailability of research results for scientists in the developing countries, since it provides free access to research results and authors can also publish freely.
OA advocates that, research that is funded with public money should be made freely available to other researchers who are also carrying out research to benefit society .
Institutions like Wellcome Trust, Research Councils of UK and US National Institute of Health(NIH) have directed that all the research they fund should be OA published. Do we have this directive from funders of research in developing countries?

What is an Open Access Publication?
Research articles or publications that are freely available on the internet, that permits any user to read, download, copy, distribute or print the articles or publications,… pass them as data to software, or use them lawfully , without any financial, legal, or technical barriers.
The only constraint when reproducing, and distributing, and for copyright, is to give authors control over the integrity of their work and to properly cite and acknowledge them. (Budapest Open Access Initiative).
An OA publication is one that is freely available on the internet and can be freely used , on condition that the author is properly and accurately acknowledged.

Some International Support for OA
Budapest Open Access Initiative, February 2002
Bethesda Statement, April 2003
Max Planck Society -Berlin Declaration, October 2003 & May 2004, February 2005, March 2006
Wellcome Trust, October 2003, May 2005, 2006
UK Parliamentary Inquiry, 2004
US House Appropriations Committee July 2004
Research Councils UK, 2006
Academy of Science of South Africa, 2006
US Public Access to Federally Funded Research Act of 2006
Ukrainian Law 2007.

Some Support Policies
Since January 2007, Ukraine’s Law that mandates Open Access to publicly funded research.
In the USA in December 2007, an appropriation Bill passed in both Houses of Congress and signed by the President instructs the US National Institute of Health (NIH) to provide OA for NIH funded research. Currently it has only12 months embargo.
European Research Council adopted OA mandate in January 2008. Currently it has 6 months embargo.
Council of the EU endorsed OA in its 2020 Vision for the European Research Area.
We are waiting for such support policies from key bodies in the developing world.

Why OA?
“ OA is a vital means of dissemination of information which is crucial for national development and in achieving MDGs, given the crucial role that information plays in achieving social, economic, cultural and political development.”
Professor Frank Youngman, DVC, University of Botswana

Why OA Publishing in Developing Countries?
Researchers in developing countries face challenges of
- Limited equipment and facilities;
-Funding;
-Poor electricity supply;
-Limited access to research from the north;
-Limited access to journals published in the north due to high cost of
subscription for libraries;
-Poor internet access due to inadequate bandwidth.
OA in developing countries is
-towards increasing access to research results from the south;
-making authors from the south and their institutions visible as well as their research
results more cited;
-enabling collaboration in research and access to more research funding.

Benefits & Obstacles of OA to developing countries
Major Benefits
- Unrestricted access to knowledge
- Speed and reduced cost of distribution
- Access to grey literatures from developing world
- Expanded opportunity to publish
Major Obstacles
- Poor State of ICT - limited computer literacy; high cost of internet access limiting access ;
low bandwidth.
- Copyright issues - authors sign away their rights and so cannot self archive their own
papers.
- Misconception of Open Access resulting from lack of awareness .

Some Open Access Initiatives in Developing Countries
Health Inter Network Access to Research Initiative (HINARI)
Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture (AGORA)
Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE)
Database of African Theses and Dissertations (DATAD)
African Journal On-line (AJOL)
Bioline International

Institutional Repositories
About 2427 Open repositories world wide. Open Access Repositories (ROAR) ( http://roar.eprints.org/ ) and Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) ( www.opendoar.org )
Open Repositories
52 in Africa
402 in Asia
84 in Australia
1198 in Europe
36 in Latin America
471 in North America
217 in South America
Africa has more work to do in this area !

Developing Countries Initiative - EIFL
EIFL is an international not-for-profit organization enabling access to knowledge for education, learning, research and sustainable community development in more than 45 transition and developing countries in Africa, Asia & Europe
EIFL network in Africa through national library consortia in Botswana, Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia & Zimbabwe and has projects in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and South Africa.
EIFL has 6 main programmes- EIFL-Licensing; EIFL-OA: open access; EIFL-IP: copyright and libraries; EIFL-FOSS : free and open source software and EIFL-PLIP : Public Library Innovation Programme and Consortium Management.

EIFL –OA (1)
EIFL-OA - Builds capacity to launch OA repositories & to ensure their long-term sustainability; advocate nationally and internationally for the adoption of OA policies and mandates; provides guidance, expertise & support material during implementation of OA projects (policies, journals, repositories, books, data, OERs) and empower library professionals, scholars, educators and students to be OA advocates
EIFL OA achievements -
-over 400 OA repositories & over 2600 OA journals in EIFL partner countries;
-OA policies have been adopted by 24 institutions in the EIFL network;
-62 awareness raising, advocacy and capacity building events and workshops in
2003-2011 in 32 countries with participants from over 50 countries.
EIFL in 2011 provided financial support to five projects in Africa: national and institutional open access advocacy campaigns to reach out to research communities in Botswana, Ghana, Malawi, Sudan and Zimbabwe. Results are still coming in.

EIFL (2)
EIFL, UNESCO, the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) workshop on the benefits of OA for research dissemination, usage, visibility and impact in Pretoria in November 2010 with attendees from ten African Universities, Councils for Sciences and Technology, Academies of Science highlighted priority areas for intervention in open access in Africa and better cooperation among institutions that are promoting access to scientific knowledge and recommended :
- Capacity building for OA publishing and OA repositories;
- Copyright management;
- Advocacy campaigns for regulatory policy frameworks (open access to
publicly funded research) to explore possibilities of OA mandates
- Launching of OA repositories;
- Publishing of OA journals.
- Exploring of business case for open scholarship environment.
- Considering a patent policy that allows the process of open innovations.
;

Africa
218 OA journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals: from Egypt, South Africa, Nigeria, Tunisia, Kenya, Morocco, Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Libya, Ghana, Mauritius, Madagascar, Algeria, Senegal & Cote d'Ivoire
56 , 914 full text articles in African Journals OnLine
OA Repositories in Africa – 52
South Africa -24; Egypt -6; Kenya -4; Nigeria-3; Mozambique, Namibia and Sudan -2 each ; Botswana, Cape Verde, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Senegal, Tunisia, Uganda and Zimbabwe – 1 each
( www.opendoar.org/countrylist )

Some Big African OA Initiatives
African Journals Online – 1998 www.ajol.info/
African Digital Library - 1999 africaeducation.org/adl/
Database of African Theses and Dissertations – 2003 www.aau.org/datad
Africa’s Open Knowledge Network – 2003
African Online Digital Library www.aodl.org/

South Africa
EIFL in 2004 through SASLI (South Africa Site Licensing Initiative) brought OA issues into South Africa.
By 2008, there were 14 IRs in South Africa.
Currently there are 24 OA IRs in most of the universities and research institutes.
South Africa leads in the number of OA IRs and other OA initiatives in Africa

NIGERIA
Christian’s study in 2008 states that 74.3% of researchers in Nigeria are not familiar with OA.
Inadequate ICT infrastructure, funding, and advocacy, poor electricity supply, high cost of bandwidth is preventing the development of OA publishing.
An international OA IR Workshop held in 2008 and some others have followed.
Currently has only 3 OA IRs.
Several other institutions are in their planning stages.
Nigeria has a great potential for OA since print and electronic publishing level is very high in the country.

GHANA (1)
Kick –off OA sensitisation Workshop by CARLIGH and EIFL in June 2007 to introduce OA IR and its various software.
A follow workshop on DSpace Software, installation and use for IR was organised by CARLIGH and INASP in September 2008.
Workshop on IR Policy, and workflows held in March 2011
KNUST has its OA IR up and running since 2009.
Some universities- UG and UCC- about to launch their OA IRs.
Other universities are far into their planning stages.

GHANA (2)
Plans are completed to organise journals from universities and research institutes in the country to publish OA. A workshop will be held next month to sensitise Editors and make decisions on this.
In all workshops organised, participants consisted of Librarians, Faculty/Researchers and IT personnel who will be involved in the OA IR work and they work together .

KNUST (1)
KNUST set up its OA IR in August 2009 in the Main Library with no additional funding from the university.
The IR registered with all the key international directories , registers and agencies.
Plans are far advanced to publish a peer- reviewed OA Journal on the OJS platform.
Populating the IR with graduate theses is on-going, but it is a challenge with papers from researchers and faculty so advocacy has been stepped up.

KNUST(2)
The Library provides guidance to researchers in sourcing OA Journal Directories, Journal titles and articles.
There is a lot of support for the OA IR from the university administration since it makes the university’s research output and its researchers visible globally . University placed 15 th on African universities ranking in January 2011.
KNUST has expressed its interest to sign the Berlin Declaration on OA and the request to Max Planck Society is being processed.
She is the 1 st African Foundation member of BioMed Central because of her support for open access publishing.

Suggestions/Recommendations(1)
Universities/research institutes should begin to publish OA peer –reviewed journals on the institution’s repository.
OA initiatives should be registered with all the key international directories , registers and agencies.
Education and advocacy is needed so that authors will publish in OA journals and repositories.
Institutional authorities need to be sensitised to see articles in OA journals as of same quality as commercial ones and so considered for advancement purposes.

Suggestions/Recommendations(2)
Libraries should now play a new role of supporting and preserving OA journals published in the institution’s repository and managed by it (Esposito,2007).
Libraries should promote OA publishing through:
- creating and maintaining OA Archives (IRs) in their institutions and
assisting authors to self archive and doing mediated archiving.
- the publication of OA journals, with the library setting up and
maintaining it.
- searching and adding OA resources, OA journal directories and search
engines on their web interfaces.

Additional information
Budapest Open Access Initiative: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/
Directory of Open Access Journals: http://www.doaj.org/
SPARC: http://www.arl.org/sparc
Public Library of Science: http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org
BioMed Central: http://www.biomedcentral.com
Open Archives Initiative: http://www.openarchives.org/
SciX Project: http://www.scix.net/
Project Romeo: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/
Max Planck Society: http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/news0321.pdf
Wellcome Trust: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/en/1/awtvispolpub.html
UK Parliamentary Inquiry Report: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39902.htm

References
Suber, Peter and Arunachalam, Subbiah (2005) Open Access to Science
in the Developing World. World Information City
Esposito Joe (2007). The Nautilus: where – and how – OA will actually
work. The Scientist , Vol.21, No.11.
http://www.the-scientist.com/ article/home/ 53781/ .
Budapest Open Access Initiative BOAI (2002)
http://www.soros.org/openaccess

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Case studies of open access initiatives for access to information in developing countries

by BioMedCentral on Nov 02, 2011

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