On August 2-3, 2008 Kyrgyzstan Library Information Consortium in collaboration with eIFL.net and American University of Central Asia organized the workshop "Open Access and Web 2.0: Improving the scientific communications " for Kyrgyz librarians. Seminar presentations (all in Russian) are here: http://www.bik.org.kg/ru/news/64/.

The Kyrgyzstan Libraries Information Consortium coordinates open access projects in Kyrgyzstan. Among them a pilot open repository in the American University of Central Asia (http://elibrary.auca.kg/dspace/), a national open repository for ETDs – CRAD (http://krad.bik.org.kg/) implemented by 12 leading academic and university libraries of Bishkek and 2 university libraries from Jalalabad and Karakol. There are plans to enrich this repository with any scholarly content materials not only from Kyrgyzstan but also from Central Asia. This new shared open repository for Central Asia will be discussed at the 9-th International conference "Issyk Kul 2008: Libraries and democratization of society", that will take place on the 1st to 5th of October 2008 in Kyrgyzstan (http://conference.bik.org.kg).

Among other plans: launching Open Access declaration in Kyrgyzstan to encourage the funders of the research to mandate open access, developing value-added services on top of the repositories (highlighting the best national medical researchers, publications in psychology, etc.), creating a directory of open access scholarly content in Russian language, publishing and disseminating advocacy kits in Russian language about open access for scientists, scholars and students, creating intellectual property policies in research institutions to support open access self-archiving, approaching National Certification Commission (issuing scientific degrees in the country) to cooperate in the CRAD project (ETD repository), encouraging University rectors to practice open access and cooperating with editorial boards of academic journals to upload published articles into the shared open repository, finding synergies and exchanging expertise in open access projects and distance education in the libraries and Universities.

Open Access was also presented at the BarCamp Central Asia 2008 – the first non-conference of such kind in Central Asia (the presentation in Russian is here: http://www.slideshare.net/irynak/ss-539771) that took place the same days – August 2-3, 2008 in the American University of Central Asia. BarCamp is an international network of user generated non-conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats. New media professionals and bloggers from Central Asia and other former Soviet Union countries attended this event (http://barcampasia.net).