Open Access in the Arab World. Presentation was given in the AUC Open Access Days.

1. AUC Open Access Days
Open Access (OA) in the Arab World
Tarek Amr
Open Knowledge, Egypt
@gr33ndata

2. Open Journal System
● Open Journal Systems (OJS) is an open-
source software for the management of peer-
reviewed academic journals.
● OJS is designed to facilitate the development of
open access, peer-reviewed publishing

3. OJS in the Region
Journals using OJS
0
500
1000
1500
2000
2500
2099
285
93
Latin Amrica
Sub-saharan Africa
Middle East and
North Africa

4. Middle East and North Africa
5
9
1
77
Egypt
Saudi
UAE
Iran

5. Public Awareness
● Wikipedia article about Open Access
– In 27 Languages
– Not in Arabic yet.
Row 1
0
10000
20000
30000
40000
50000
60000
Wikibooks
Books per Language
English
German
French
Hebrew
Arabic

6. Open Access to what?
● Peer-reviewed research papers
● Draft and unpublished papers
● Dissertations and Thesis
● Course work and Tutorials
● Books
● Code and Datasets

7. Open Access
● Gold and Green Open Access
● Legal aspects
– Free / Libre / Gratis
– Translation
● Technical aspects
– Access for humans and machines
– Search Engines

8. Examples from Egypt
● Gold OA
– Hindawi (APC)
● Green OA
– AUC DAR
– Open DOAR: Cairo, Helwan, Menofia and British
Universities in Egypt. Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
● LibreBooks.org
● TahrirAcademy.org
● Self publishing

9. Open Data
● Open Data Index (OKFN)
– 70 Countries surveyed in 2013
– 5 Arab Countries
– Egypt ranked 53
– Tunisia ranked 48
● Data is needed by researchers
● Data already used in researches
● Data used but not published

10. Just for humour! Not really.
● Crowdsourcing Academia
– Translation of OA papers
– Peer-reviews, crowd-reviews!
– Research itself, really!?