Myanmar’s research community has enthusiastically embraced the new Myanmar Education Research and Learning (MERAL) Portal. 

In just four months since the launch of the MERAL Portal in July 2020, content has doubled. The portal now includes almost 6,000 journal articles, conference papers, theses and dissertations, research papers, books and books chapters from 19 universities. In 2020, there were 108,461 downloads of papers.

The MERAL Portal is a partnership between the Myanmar Rectors’ Committee, National Education Policy Commission, Department of Higher Education, the Ministry of Education, EIFL and the National Institute of Informatics, Japan. The partners signed an agreement to develop a national portal for research outputs from Myanmar universities in February, 2020. 

The portal is achieving its aim of opening up research outputs from Myanmar to the world. It has been indexed in the BASE search engine for academic web resources, CORE open access aggregator, Google Scholar, OpenDOAR - the global Directory of Open Access Repositories - and the Unpaywall service that locates open access versions of articles. People from 98 countries have viewed over 232,000 MERAL Portal pages. 

Eighteen more universities and the Myanmar Academy of Arts and Science have already expressed interest in contributing their research outputs to the MERAL Portal and we expect that more institutions will join in 2021.

More about EIFL’s contribution to open access in Myanmar.