Open access advocacy in Belarus and Serbia | EIFL

"Belarusian national open access (OA) website as a focal point for advocacy campaigns to reach out to research communities Republican Research-and-Production Unitary Enterprise "Diatech" (a leading OA publisher in the country) in partnership with the National Library of Belarus and the Belarus Council of Libraries on Information Cooperation (BelCoLib) implemented a project on building national communities of OA practitioners and decision-makers. The main objectives of the project included: create a nationwide community website to showcase and support communication and collaboration across universities and scholarly societies involved in the OA movement; promote sharing information and expertise on OA; and support cross-institutional linking between researchers and projects with shared interests... University of Belgrade is one of the largest universities in South Eastern Europe with 90.000 students and 7.000 staff members. In 2011 the University of Belgrade signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access (OA) to Knowledge in Sciences and Humanities expressing a general support of OA principles. But there was a need to raise awareness of faculty and students at different institutions and to encourage them to practice OA. The OA advocacy campaign's focus was on providing information on OA in general and on encouraging students and professors of the University of Belgrade to comply with the guidelines provided by central administration of the university that encourages usage and production of OA research outputs (in particular, the mandatory submission of electronic versions of all PhD theses (ETDs) completed in 2012 and onwards to the OA repository)..."