Dear colleagues, you may find the following news item of interest:
EIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) which is a not-for-profit organization that works with libraries to enable access to knowledge in developing and transition economy countries in Africa, Asia Pacific, Europe and Latin America and partners have launched a two-year project titled ‘Open access policy development in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda to make more digital content available’. Funded by Spider, the Swedish Programme for ICT in Developing Regions, the project is intended to provide access to research outputs from Eastern Africa.
Researchers in Eastern Africa are producing important research that can contribute to development and scholarship. However, much of this is not available online and cannot be read. To make more digital content openly available, the project will work with 16 research intensive universities in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda to develop and adopt open access policies that are needed to speed up depositing of content into repositories. There are currenty 64 open access (OA) repositories in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, and there are dozens of OA journals being published. Major stakeholders – researchers and students, research administrators, policy makers and librarians – are aware of OA, and there is already a skilled staff to manage OA journals and repositories. But growth of content in the repositories is expected to be intensified.
More of this story can be accessed here
