eIFL.net Call for proposals: Open access advocacy campaigns

  An eIFL.net call for proposals for organising national or institutional open access advocacy campaigns to reach out to research communities was released as of Feb 14th, 2011 within the EIFL-OA programme.


Working in collaboration with libraries in more than 45 developing and transition countries in Africa, Asia and Europe, eIFL.net enables access to knowledge for education, learning, research and sustainable community development. EIFL.net is a worldwide-known advocate for open access to promote knowledge sharing.

EIFL Open Access (OA) programme in particular is working along the following lines:

• Building capacity to launch open access repositories and to ensure their long-term sustainability

• Offering training, supporting knowledge sharing, and providing expertise on open access policies and practices (open access journals, open access repositories, open access books, open data and open educational resources)

• Empowering library professionals, scholars, educators and students to become open access advocates

• Advocating nationally and internationally for the adoption of open access policies and mandates


This call seems a good chance for carrying out a thorough awareness-rising campaign on Open Access at UofK, while at the same time establishing an Open Access Institutional Repository for the Faculty of Science, University of Khartoum. As previous discussions on how this should be achieved had already been held last November at the Open Access Africa conference, it took Rania Baleela, University of Khartoum, and Pablo de Castro, Carlos III University Madrid just a few days to jointly assemble a proposal for having an IR set and a wide Open Access advocacy campaign carried out at the Faculty of Science/UofK.

The proposal was submitted to eIFL.net within the application deadline of Feb 28th, 2011. Veredict on selected proposals is due by approximately Mar 14th. Results of the eIFL.net call –either positive or negative for Faculty of Science/UofK purposes- will be announced at this blog, so stay tuned!