Call for proposals: Open access advocacy campaigns

Open access is the immediate, online, free and unrestricted availability of peer-reviewed, research literature. It provides the means to maximize the visibility and use of research output. We advocate for open access to promote knowledge sharing.

EIFL Open Access (OA) programme in action ...

• Empowering library professionals, researchers and students to become open access advocates.

• Advocating nationally and internationally for the adoption of open access policies and mandates.

• Offering training, supporting knowledge sharing, and providing expertise on open access policies and practices (open access journals, open access repositories, open access books, open data and open educational resources).

• Building capacity to launch open access repositories and open access journals and to ensure their long-term sustainability.

Call for proposals

Following the success of last year's grant competition, the EIFL-OA programme invites new proposals for organising national or institutional open access advocacy campaigns to reach out to research communities. We particularly wish to involve active researchers and students, research administrators and policy makers, university presses, society publishers, researchers/research groups as publishers and journalists.

Some examples of the advocacy actions that could be implemented in partnerships with senior management and open access champions from the faculty:

• expanding educational materials on open access targeted toward researchers;

• preparing and distributing open access brochures along with supporting web and multimedia materials;

• using new media to educate researchers about open access and share best practices;

• presentation series at faculty meetings;

• hosting workshops and events;

• collaborating with university presses and scholarly societies on campus-based publishing partnerships;

• developing case studies to illustrate successful open access projects;

• describing business models and sustainability plans for open access initiatives;

• promoting the adoption of campus-based, faculty-driven open access policies;

• collecting success stories, forming collaborations and networks that can deliver joint advocacy efforts;

• building national communities of open access practitioners;

• embedding research repositories into institutional processes, systems and culture (library management systems, research information systems, other internal and external databases) ensuring that the repository is seen by both researchers and senior managers as part of the institutional research infrastructure and as a natural tool for disseminating research and for raising researchers profile.

Application procedure

Proposals should:

• Provide an overview of current open access activities in your country and institution.

• Describe your advocacy strategy: how do you plan to reach out to research communities.

• Describe your project work plan and time frame. Note that the duration of the grant can be from three to seven months.

• Describe how your advocacy work will improve the current situation or how it will add to the evidence base.

• Describe your goals and the measurement(s) of success that you will use.

• Provide a budget to support your action plan. Note that EIFL financial contribution is limited up to 4,000 USD.

• Be written in English.

• Application deadline is Monday, April 2nd, 2012.

We encourage you to read EIFL-OA case studies describing the results and lessons learnt of 13 projects supported in 2011 that implemented national and institutional open access advocacy campaigns to reach out to research communities and open access publishing initiatives: http://www.eifl.net/eifl-oa-case-studies.

You can also see other recommended resources:

• Open Access Week;

• Repository Support Project (RSP);

• RSP’s practical guide to embedding research repositories into institutional processes, systems and culture;

• NECOBELAC Project Training Activities; 

• SPARC;

• Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS).

The EIFL-OA programme manager will be available to support your work during implementation of your projects. 

Who can apply

Libraries and organisations from EIFL partner countries are eligible to participate. Applications are invited from any individual libraries and organisations or pairings or groups of libraries and organisations under EIFL partner consortia umbrella.

How to apply and deadline

1. Please fill in the application form that can be downloaded here [DOC].
2. Then, you MUST submit your project application online here.
3. In case you have technical problems, you can send your project application to iryna.kuchma[@]eifl.net

Application deadline is MONDAY, APRIL 2nd, 2012.

Programme support

This programme is supported by Information programme, Open Society Foundations.

Evaluation procedure and publicity

Funding is granted on a competitive basis. Winners will be notified by April 16, 2012.

Grant recipients will be featured on the EIFL website and Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS).

Contact person

If you have any questions or need clarifications, please contact the EIFL-OA Programme Manager, Iryna Kuchma (iryna.kuchma[@]eifl.net).

Files / Images: 

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eifl-oa_advocacy_application_feb_2012.doc