Call for proposals: Open access advocacy campaigns

Published:

14 Feb 2011

EIFL partner countries to reach out to research communities

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 ...

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

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).

Empowering library professionals, scholars, educators and students to become open access advocates.

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

Call for proposals

The EIFL-OA programme invites proposals for organising national or institutional open access advocacy campaigns to reach out to research communities. We particularly wish to involve scholarly and scientific researchers, universities and colleges, and university presses and society publishers.

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;

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.

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 3 to 10 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 February 28th, 2011.

If you are looking for examples of successful advocacy campaigns, please see the following websites:

Open Access Week;

Repository Support Project;

NECOBELAC project;

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 [Application form.doc].
2. Then, you MUST submit the application form online here.
3. In case you have technical problems, you can send your application form to iryna.kuchma[@]eifl.net

Application deadline is FEBRUARY 28th 2011.

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 approximately March 14, 2011.

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).

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