On May 14-15, 2008, Georgian Integrated Library & Information System Consortium (GILISC) and eIFL.net organised a workshop Open Access: New Models for Scholarly Communication. Hosted by Ilia Chavchavadze State University the workshop addressed Open Access policies and recommendations and highlighted the benefits of Open Access journals and Open repositories.

Publishers of Georgian Open Access journals – Computer Science and Telecommunications, Education Sciences and Psychology, Physics, Jurisprudence, Musicology and Cultural Science, Germanistische Studien all published by Georgian Internet Academy (http://gesj.internet-academy.org.ge/) and Bulletin of the Tbilisi International Centre of Mathematics and Informatics (TICMI) published by the I.Vekua Institute of Applied Mathematics, I.Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University and Georgian Academy of Natural Sciences (http://www.emis.de/journals/TICMI/blt/bulletin.htm) shared their experience in publishing Open Access journals in Georgia. And Georgian Internet Academy is open to collaboration with other journal publishers in the country suggesting them to use its publishing software and ICT support.

The National Parliamentary Library of Georgia (http://www.nplg.gov.ge/ ) presented the first open repository in the country with more than 200 full texts dissertations. Scholars and researchers, editors-in-chief of peer review scientific and scholarly journals and University librarians discussed how to launch a new Open Access Journal or to convert a subscription based journal to Open Access as well as management of Open repositories, copyright and open content licenses.

International cooperation and research development – better quality research and education – were mentioned as the benefits of Open Access projects in Georgia during the round table discussion “How to move forward – Open Access Policies, Open Access repositories, Open Access Journals”. Libraries seem to be the best managers of open repositories, because they are good in metadata and long-term preservation. Although there is still a need for adding English fields to the bibliographic descriptions and metadata fields (at the moment all bibliographic descriptions in the country are done in the language of the original document which is in most of the cases – Georgian language). And journal publishers are natural partners for the libraries to provide post-prints for open repositories. The workshop participants agreed to create an Open Access working group and to develop a pilot project for the national open repository with centrally managed infrastructure and virtually different repositories managed by institutions. Articles already published in the peer-reviewed journals are planned to be the initial content for this repository and annual reports of the Universities and research institutions will be used to identify the lists of these articles.

New approaches to quality control were also addressed during the workshop and there was a suggestion that a University can announce a call for proposal for reviewing a yearly estimate number of articles published in this University and the editorial boards of the journals can provide peer-reviewing services to the University on the conditions defined by the University.

Presentations from the workshop are available here: http://www.eifl.net/cps/sections/services/eifl-oa/training

Contact person: Irakli Garibashvili, eIFL country coordinator, igar[at]hotmail.com, iraklig99[at]yahoo.com