EIFL and Kenya Library & Information Services Consortium (KLISC), EIFL’s partner consortium in Kenya, will host an open access (OA) policy formulation workshop for top level managers from five Universities in Kenya. The event takes place during International Open Access Week 2016, and will also celebrate the week. 

The five universities are United States International University – Africa, Edgerton University, Kabarak University, Maseno University and Moi University. All are partners in a two-year EIFL project titled ‘OA policy development in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda to make more digital content available’.

The workshop aims to -

• Raise awareness about OA policies and advocate for OA policy formulation in universities;
• Offer participants hands-on experience in drafting OA policies for their institutions based on good practice examples from three other Kenyan universities (University of Nairobi, Kenyatta University and Kirinyaga University);
• Enhance development and implementation of OA policies in Kenya.

The project works with 16 research intensive universities in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda to develop and adopt OA policies, and to enhance OA repositories to ensure that they work well together with other systems and platforms, and include new functionalities to make them more user-friendly and to enable easier sharing of research outputs.  

The project is funded by Spider, the Swedish Programme for ICT in Developing Regions, located at DSV, Department of Computer and System Sciences, which is part of Stockholm University.

For further information about the workshop, contact Rosemary Otando, EIFL’s Country and Open Access Coordinator in Kenya, rosemary.otando@uonbi.ac.ke.

The workshop is one of several events organized by EIFL, EIFL's partner library consortia and partners across the globe to celebrate Open Access Week 2016. Open Access Week is an annual, global event established by SPARC in 2008 to raise awareness about open access and to call for open access to be the new norm in scholarship and research.