Advocating for the creation and maintenance of open public infrastructures that enable the publication and sharing of research in open access journals and open repositories is one of the objectives of the EIFL Open Access Programme. This year (2022) EIFL is supporting open access journal publishing projects in Ethiopia, Georgia, Ghana, Kenya and Lesotho. In this news item, we highlight our support for open repository enhancements, working in partnership with library consortia in Armenia, Congo (DRC), Ghana, Lesotho and Uganda. 

In Armenia, the National Library of Armenia will improve access to its digital materials - open access Armenian theses and dissertations, books and the Bulletin of Armenian Libraries -  through the creation of a new repository using DSpace 7 software, OA policy development and integration of Creative Commons licences. The new repository will be a part of a national open science infrastructure, supporting a national open science working group at the Ministry of Education and Science and development of a national open science policy. 

In Congo (DRC), Université Libre des Pays des Grands Lacs (ULPGL) will develop and adopt an institutional open access and open science policy and promote the adoption of open science policies by members of the Consortium des Bibliothèques Académiques du Congo (COBAC). Visibility of ULPGL research results will be improved by setting up a community for sharing research through the open access repository, Zenodo.

In Ghana, the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Ghana (CARLIGH) will conduct an audit of institutional repositories of 15 CARLIGH member institutions and will provide technical support on enhancing institutional repositories, training IT/Library staff to manage the repositories and developing institutional repository policies and operational manuals. 

In Lesotho, the National University of Lesotho will train librarians in open science advocacy, upgrade their institutional repository software to DSpace 7 and approve an institutional open science policy.

In Uganda, the Consortium of Uganda University Libraries (CUUL) will host advocacy meetings and conduct an open science (status of OA repositories) readiness assessment at 10 institutions. CUUL will intensify advocacy and promotion of open science, particularly at the top level of institutions and with key stakeholders, including heads of research, top management, librarians and IT personnel. 

In 2022, EIFL will continue to support repository managers in other EIFL partner countries.

USEFUL RESOURCE

See the updated EIFL Checklist: How to make your open access repository work really well. This is the 5th revision of the checklist, published in December 2021. We have included the new DSpace 7.1 software release - the largest release in the history of DSpace software. We have updated information about repository interoperability, and added COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) controlled vocabularies, OpenAIRE and Wikipedia to the discoverability section. We have also updated the repository policy and licensing sections and added more tips on ORCID-DSpace integrations.