OA advocacy campaign case studies: Malawi, Sudan, Zimbabwe

EIFL has provided small grants to support national and institutional open access advocacy campaigns to reach out to research communities.

Below are the results of institutional campaigns from Malawi, Sudan, and Zimbabwe as reported by:  Kondowani Wella, University of Malawi, Kamuzu College of Nursing; Agnes Chikonzo, University of Zimbabwe; and Rania M. H. Baleela, Faculty of Science, University of Khartoum, and Pablo de Castro, Director, GrandIR, CB.

Malawi

Institutional open access advocacy campaign to reach out to research communities

Key achievements 

• 35 researchers attended two ‘research lunches’ (one at Lilongwe Campus and one at Blantyre Campus) where they learned about OA and its benefits.
• The most distinguished researchers of Kamuzu College of Nursing have now deposited their publications into the repository: Dr Address Malata (Associate Professor of Nursing) who is the Principal of the College and Dr Ellen Chirwa (Associate Professor of Nursing) who is also Vice Principal, Dr. Angela Chimwaza and Dr Abigail Kazembe.
• Launch of an OA Malawi Nursing Journal has been proposed.
• After the advocacy campaign, the library received 15 journal articles and one book chapter for deposit into the IR (prior to the campaign, when they put out the same request, they only received one publication).
• The project raised the profile of the library. Traditionally, the library is viewed as a passive supporter of curriculum implementation.
• The Principal proposed that the importance of IR and OA publishing should be shared with other colleges in the University of Malawi. She further proposed that University of Malawi should be requested to consider amending rules and regulations for promotion of academic staff to recognise depositing in OA IR.
• Funding was secured to purchase a new and high specifications server for the IR. As a result the project changed from an advocacy to implementation and advocacy.

Read the case study [PDF] 

Sudan

The first Sudanese open access institutional repository at the faculty of science, university of Khartoum

Key achievements 

• Dspace@ScienceUofK IR (the first in Sudan) is live and its contents are steadily growing; currently over 221 documents are openly available.
• Since launch, there has been an increase in usage, reaching a high of over 1121 downloads in one month.
• Three training courses were held: 1) copyright issues and content deposition into the IR mainly designed for librarians and IT personnel (in July); 2) OA and IRs for researchers (in July); and 3) Managing the IR for repository administrators and managers (in November). Over 50 people attended the training sessions.
• Awareness raising activities have been carried out for Faculty of Science scholars and students, inspiring several to publish OA for the first time; and providing librarians with the knowledge to advocate for OA.
• A proposal for the UofK to take steps towards adoption of an institutional OA policy was well received and the UofK is currently considering signing the Berlin Declaration.
• The UofK Vice Chancellor endorsed the project to be university-wide (thereby encouraging other faculties to join).
• The project has attracted national attention with the Sudanese Council of Ministries Documentation Department naming it a project of significant, national importance.
• The OASCIR managers have received many invitations to present at various events, both national (such KMCA2012 Workshop that took place in January 2012) and international (OA Africa 2011 Conference in Ghana).
• The entire project has been documented on the OASCIR blog, thereby facilitating replication by other institutions.
• The project has had a very high impact on the UofK ranking at the January 2012 Webometrics edition of the Ranking of World Universities (#11 in the Arab world rank: compared to #29 in January 2011; and #13 in the African continent rank ).

Read the case study [PDF]

Zimbabwe

University of Zimbabwe 2011 open access advocacy campaign: say “No! to secret knowledge: support open access”

Key achievements 

• The Vice Chancellor has agreed that the UZ Electronic Theses and Dissertation Database should be openly available since UZ is now a member of Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD).
• The university community has fully embraced the OA concept.
• Over 300 participants, from 6 of the 10 Faculties at UZ, attended OA workshops.
• After attending an OA seminar, faculty librarians felt confident enough to approach researchers and advocate for OA.
• An OA policy is being written, a draft should be available by June 2012.
• OA resources portal has been included on the UZ Library e-resources web page.
• Several researchers saw an increase in usage and global visibility of the articles deposited in the UZ IR (e.g. see the statistics of Mr. E. Chapanga, Faculty of Arts OA champion person)

 Read the case study [PDF]

Background

This week we will release all the case studies describing the results of 13 EIFL-funded projects that implemented national and institutional Open Access advocacy campaigns to reach out to research communities and Open Access publishing initiatives. Through small grants and support from their own institutions, the projects engaged in a wide variety of campaigns and activities, including: holding workshops, creating websites, building institutional repositories, creating an e-learning course, and implementing an open access publishing platforms. All of which resulted in increased awareness about and understanding of Open Access.

The EIFL-OA programme is supported by the Information programme, Open Society Foundations.