Dr.Helen M. Byamugisha, Associate Library Professor/Ag. University Librarian, Makerere University

1. OPEN ACCESS INITIATIVES IN UGANDA
A Paper Presented
by
Dr. Helen M. Byamugisha
Associate Library Professor/
Ag. University Librarian
Makerere University

2. • Introduction
• Definition of Open Access
• Justification and Degrees of OA
• Motivation for OA Publishing
• Benefits of OA Publishing
• Open Access Initiatives in Uganda
• Challenges of OA in Uganda
• Conclusion
PRESENTATION OUTLINE

3. INTRODUCTION
• Governments provide billions of dollars for research funding.
•Authors submit their work to publishers free of charge, in the
interest of advancing human knowledge.
•Researchers review each other’s work for free.
•Those that contributed to the research have to pay again to
access the findings.

4. INTRODUCTION CONT…
• Though research is a public good, it is not available to the public
who paid for it.
• Communicating research uses a print-based model in the digital
age.
• The results are hidden behind technical, legal, and financial
barriers.
• Publishers restrict access to a small fraction of users, locking out
most of the world’s population and preventing the use of new
research techniques.
• Hence, the call for Open Access.

5. WHAT IS OPEN ACCESS?
The term "open access" was first formulated in three public
statements in the 2000s:
• The Budapest Open Access Initiative in February 2002,
• The Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing in June 2003,
• The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the
Sciences and Humanities in October 2003.

6. WHAT IS OPEN ACCESS CONT’D….?
The initial concept of “open access” refers to:
an unrestricted online access to scholarly research primarily intended
for scholarly journal articles.

7. WHAT IS OPEN ACCESS CONT’D…?
• Open-access (OA) is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most
copyright and licensing restrictions“ (Suber,2010).
• Open access contents are not restricted only to peer-reviewed
research articles, they can be in any formats from texts and data to
software, audio, video, and multi-media.
• OA can also apply to non-scholarly content, like music, movies,
and novels, even if these are not the focus of most OA activists
(Suber, 2010).

8. JUSTIFICATION OF OPEN ACCESS?
Harnad (2008) suggests three main justifications of OA:
"to maximise the uptake, usage, applications and impact of
the research output of a university;
to measure and reward the uptake, usage, applications and
impact of the research output of a university (research
metrics);
to collect, manage and showcase a permanent record of the
research output and impact of a university".

9. DEGREES OF OPEN ACCESS?
There are two different degrees of providing open access: Gratis
and Libre OA
• Gratis OA - free online access
• Libre OA – free online access plus some additional re-use
rights.
• The Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin definitions had
corresponded only to libre OA.

10. DEGREES OF OPEN ACCESS CONT’D...?
The re-use rights of libre OA are often specified by various
specific Creative Commons licenses.
These almost all require attribution of authorship to the original
authors.

11. MOTIVATIONS FOR OPEN ACCESS
PUBLISHING
•The advent of Internet and the World Wide Web.
•A growing movement for academic journal publishing reform.
•Electronic publishing created new benefits as compared to
paper publishing.
•Viable funding models to maintain traditional peer review
standards of quality.

12. MOTIVATION FOR OA PUBLISHING CONT’D..
•The problems of social inequality caused by restricting access
to academic research, which favor large and wealthy institutions
with the financial means to purchase access to many journals.
• The economic challenges and perceived unsustainability of
academic publishing.

13. BENEFITS OF OPEN ACCESS
Open access provides several benefits to:
• Researchers,
•Educators,
•Journals,
•Publishers,
•Funding agencies,
•Governments and academic institutions around the
world.

14. BENEFITS OF OPEN ACCESS
Research and publication
- researchers have wider visibility and usage of their
research findings.
- researchers have a significantly larger and more diverse
audience.
- Increased exposure to research also increases citation rate.
- OA provides an avenue to connect with a global society
more easily
- Researchers can publish without printing costs.

15. BENEFITS OF OPEN ACCESS CONTD…
Teaching staff and students:
•Open Access provides free articles for teaching and learning.
Benefits to author:
•OA gives authors a worldwide audience larger than that of any
subscription- based journal, no matter how prestigious or
popular.
•Increases the visibility and impact of authors’ work (Willinsky,
2010, Suber, 2010).

16. BENEFITS OF OPEN ACCESS…
•Benefit to readers: Readers around the globe can have barrier
free access to the latest literature and research findings.
•Benefit to Society: Society as a whole benefits from an
expanded and accelerated research cycle in which research can
advance more effectively because researchers have immediate
access to all the findings they need.
•Journals and publishers: OA makes their articles more visible,
discoverable, retrievable, and useful. If a journal is OA, then it
can use this superior visibility to attract submissions and
advertising, not to mention readers and citations (Suber, 2010).

17. BENEFITS OF OPEN ACCESS CONTD…
Funding agencies
•OA increases the return on their investment in research:provides
fairness to taxpayers by providing them open access to the
results of publicly-funded research (Suber, 2010).
Governments
•Governments also benefit as funders of research.
•OA also promotes democracy by sharing non-classified
government information as widely as possible (Suber, 2010).

18. BENEFITS OF OPEN ACCESS CONTD…
Librarians
•Librarians help users find the information they need, regardless
of the budget-enforced limits on the library's own collection.
•Librarians help faculties increase their audience and impact, and
help the university raise its research profile (Suber, 2010).
Universities
•Universities benefit from their researchers' increased impact and
increase their visibility.
•OA reduces Universities journal expenses and advances their
mission to share knowledge.

19. BENEFITS OF OPEN ACCESS CONTD…
Citizens:
•OA gives citizens access to peer-reviewed research, which is
unavailable in public libraries, and to the research for which
they pay taxes.
• OA also accelerates the translation of research into new
medicines, useful technologies, solved problems, and informed
decisions that benefit everyone (Suber, 2010).
Libraries:
• OA solves the pricing and permission crisis for
scholarly journals.

20. BENEFITS OF OPEN ACCESS CONTD…
Benefits to nations
•Open access incorporates local research into a network of
global knowledge;
•Increases impact of local research, providing new contacts and
research partnerships for authors;
•Removes professional isolation and
•Strengthens economies through developing a strong and
independent national science base ((Antelman, 2004, Nicholas
& Rowlands, 2005, Giarlo, 2005, Canada, 2009, Willinsky,
2010, Suber, 2010).

21. ACADEMIC LIBRARY OPEN ACCESS INITIATIVES
•OA is a prerequisite for academic libraries to survive and thrive
(Giarlo, 2005).
•Academic libraries have come up with three major open access
initiatives:
-Online public access catalogue,
- Open Access Journal Systems.
- Institutional repositories,

22. ACADEMIC LIBRARY OPEN ACCESS
INITIATIVES
Institutional repositories (IRs)
• Also known as digital repositories, or open access repositories
• Widely seen as the fastest route to open access for the widest range
of scholarly and research literature.
• Most of IRs are hosted within academic libraries to digitally collect
and preserve academic papers and other documents in order to
make them freely accessible over the Internet to the students,
faculty and the public (Swan & Chan 2009).

23. ACADEMIC LIBRARY OPEN ACCESS
INITIATIVES
Benefits of Institutional Repositories
• Academic institution
- Increasing its visibility and prestige;
- Marketing the institution to attract high quality staff, students
and funding;
- Centralizing, storing and long term circulating of all types of
institutional output,
- Supports learning, teaching; and research

24. INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES CONTD…
Benefits to authors:
•Increased dissemination and impact of scholarship;
•Enhanced professional visibility due to broader dissemination
•Increased use of publications;
•Longer term accessibility of material compared to a personal
web site;
•A central archive of a researcher's work;
•Possibility of large scale collaborations (Johnson, 2002, Bankier
and Perciali, 2008, White, 2009, Lyte et al, 2009, Jain, 2011).

25. INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES CONTD…
Benefits to Librarians
• Provides increased visibility and institutional presence to librarians.
• Librarians have the opportunity to work hand-in-hand with
academia and faculties to promote the repository.
• Librarians can provide the skills required to develop and run an
effective IR, e.g. in copyright checking, metadata creation,
authority control.
• Librarians can act as change agents in support of the adoption of
IRs.

26. OPEN ACCESS INITIATIVES IN UGANDA
Institutional Repositories are seen as the fastest route to open access
initiatives in Uganda. The repositories are found in:
• Makerere University Aga Khan University
• Uganda Martyrs University Uganda Christian University

27. OPEN ACCESS INITIATIVES IN UGANDA
Makerere University Institutional Repository (MakIR)
• Was launched in 2006 as Uganda Scholarly Digital Library
(USDL).
• Designed within the framework of a digital project known as the
Uganda Scholarly Digital Library project (USDL).
• The main objective of the project was to bring all the scattered
research articles in Uganda that were not easily accessible.

28. OPEN ACCESS INITIATIVES IN UGANDA
Makerere University Institutional Repository (MakIR)
•Built on D Space software, with support of the University of
Bergen, University of Tennessee and Tufts University.
•The University of Bergen Library hosted the pilot project.
•Gave the implementation team administrative and submission
rights to learn how to use the system remotely.
•The project failed due to limited bandwidth and bulkiness of
scanned files. a server was installed at Makerere University to
resolve the problem.

29. OPEN ACCESS INITIATIVES IN UGANDA
Makerere University Institutional Repository (MakIR)
• Total Number of Records: 4,984
• Types of documents held:
- Articles, Reports
- Books, Conference papers-Conference proceedings,
- Oral Recordings, Reports, technical
- Journal articles, peer reviewed
- Theses and Dissertations
- Journal articles, preprints, etc

30. OPEN ACCESS INITIATIVES IN UGANDA
Aga Khan University Institutional Repository
• Was launched 30th June 2013.
• Built for preserving, promoting and providing access to the
University's research and publications under one umbrella, in full
text wherever possible.
• eCommons@AKU name was chosen and run on digital commons
software, a product of bepress, California- based company.
• Uploading started at AKU Pakistan as a seed collection with full
text articles published in local journals
• Had 3,012 documents by 2014.

31. OPEN ACCESS INITIATIVES IN UGANDA
Uganda Martyrs University Institutional Repository
(DSpace@UMU)
• DSpace@UMU was launched in October 2012;
• The software was a product of MIT.
• Offers access to the research, scholarly output and publications of
the University.

32. OPEN ACCESS INITIATIVES IN UGANDA
Librarians role is:
• Understanding faculty needs.
• Developing Irs, uploading and content.
• Promoting IRs benefits and training faculty, students and other
stakeholders.
• Directing students and faculty towards IR resources.
• Helping faculties increase their audience and impact, and helping
the university raise its research profile.
• Developing IR policies.

33. CHALLENGES OF OPEN ACCESS IN UGANDA
Challenges and obstacles in setting up the IRs
• Faculty deposits in institutional repositories remain low
(Grundmann, 2009) due to:
- misconceptions and a lack of understanding of IRs
- copyright issues,
- publisher policies,
- lack of incentives,
-lack of respectability for IR articles,

34. CHALLENGES OF OPEN ACCESS IN UGANDA…
challenges and obstacles in setting up the IRs
• the cost of setting up and maintenance
• labor-intensive,
• promotional challenges.

35. CHALLENGES OF OA IN UGANDA…
Internet and ICTs
• High cost of ICTs, connectivity and poor telecommunication
infrastructure.
• Universities still struggling to achieve wide access to high speed
broadband services.

36. CONCLUSION
•Despite the challenges, there are positive indications to open
access initiatives in Uganda.
•There are many benefits of open access.
•Libraries in academic Libraries in Uganda are striving to bring
scholars together around the world through Institutional
Repositories.

37. THE END
KTH LIBRARY
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