Opening access – views from the South / Feature Articles / Home - ICT Update, a current awareness bulletin for ACP agriculture

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-06-29

Summary:

"The ability to access relevant research results is essential for countries to solve the many development challenges they face. This is particularly true in the South, where the need for sustainable agriculture to feed a growing population and other development challenges require policies and action designed for local situations and needs. Initiatives such as the Journals Online project, African Journals Online and Research4Life, and conscious efforts to develop open access policies, as the University of Nairobi in Kenya has done, are the first steps in bridging the knowledge gap between industrialised and developing countries ...  Developing countries will only fully integrate into the knowledge economy if they also become producers of research and not just receivers of international ‘knowledge’. This belief is what prompted the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) to set up a pilot project called African Journals Online in 1998 to promote the awareness and digital use of African scientific articles. Africa Journals Online has grown into a platform, both subscription-based and open access, for over 400 journals published in Africa. These journals represent vital channels for sharing locally generated research, and exploring their role and prospects for survival is crucial.  Building on the success of Africa Journals Online, INASP then established the Journals Online project that broadened the scope to include journals from Latin America and countries such as Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Mongolia. The project helps journals in developing countries, which are often only available in print, to get online to increase their visibility and accessibility. By the end of 2012, the INASP project counted 240 journals with almost 20,000 articles, of which 88% were open access. There have been over 12.6 million downloads since 2007.  The online journals managed by INASP are multi-disciplinary. However, a key focus is agriculture and related issues such as food security, ecology, and agricultural by-products like foods, fibres, fuels and raw materials. Modern developments in agricultural chemistry and engineering, together with urbanisation, are affecting the kind of research being undertaken in this area ... A 2010 study on access to research results in East and Southern African universities by Jonathan Harle, programmes manager at the UK-registered Association of Commonwealth Universities, showed that making research freely available does not necessarily mean that it will be used effectively. Open access is most effective when married with academic literacy training, effective signposting, a research culture that supports critical thinking and government policies that advocate the value of research in development and innovation at a national level.   The open access policy established by the University of Nairobi in Kenya is a powerful example of an effective government, organisational and institutional cross-sector approach to open access. It began when the government introduced performance contracts in the public sector in Kenya in 2005, including at the university and its library. The contract essentially set targets that would hold the public agency, in this case the university, accountable for its performance ... Many other initiatives have been established to help address research information needs and give researchers and academics in developing countries access to online academic articles that formerly would have been behind expensive paywalls. These include Research4Life, which is the collective name for AGORA (agriculture), HINARI (medicine and health) OARE (environmental science) and ARDI (technology and innovation), four public–private partnerships that aim to provide the developing world with access to critical scientific research.  INASP runs a suite of programmes designed to strengthen research capacity in developing countries. This includes enabling them to purchase cost-effective subscriptions to international scholarly journals and supporting efforts to develop the skills of librarians, researchers, ICT staff and journal editors. In fact, the resources made available via these access initiatives have been joined by a growing number of open access resources in recent years, which have full texts available online at no cost to the reader. These include those listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, the Directory of Open Access Repositories, the Directory of Open Access Books and in 2013 the launch of Open Access Theses and Dissertations ..."

Link:

http://ictupdate.cta.int/Feature-Articles/Opening-access-views-from-the-South/(72)/1372325095

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.gold oa.policies oa.comment oa.agriculture oa.africa oa.kenya oa.etds oa.doab oa.ecology oa.hinari oa.inasp oa.agora oa.oare oa.ardi oa.u.nairobi oa.food-security oa.african_journals_online oa.research4life oa.journals oa.south oa.opendoar

Date tagged:

06/29/2013, 09:02

Date published:

06/29/2013, 05:02