In 2011-2013 EIFL provided financial support to 34 projects that implemented national and institutional open access (OA) advocacy campaigns to reach out to research communities and OA publishing initiatives.

Through small grants and support from their own institutions, the projects engaged in a wide variety of campaigns and activities, including: holding workshops, creating websites, building institutional OA repositories, creating e-learning courses, and implementing OA publishing platforms.

The case studies resulting from the projects reveal impressive first-time achievements and will help increase the availability of research literature in developing and transition countries.

Learn more about the key achievements for this national OA campaign in Sudan below. You can access the full case study (strategies, tactics and tools, success stories and lessons learnt) by clicking on the download button.

About the project in Sudan

Building on the success of the first Sudanese OA institutional (faculty) repository at the University of Khartoum’s Faculty of Science, which was funded by EIFL in 2011 (learn more), this new 2012 project planned to extend Dspace@ScienceUofK to become the University of Khartoum’s OA institutional repository (IR) and conduct awareness-raising campaigns among students and researchers across three significant institutions in Sudan: the University of Khartoum, the leading higher education and research institution in Sudan that produce over a half of the Sudanese research output; Sudan University of Science and Technology (SUST), the first and leading polytechnic university in the country; and El Neelain University whose enrollment includes a large number of distance learning students.

Key Achievements

• Successfully engaged undergraduate students and young researchers to become new, major stakeholders in the project. The students created a SudHENL Facebook page and also provided feedback for innovative ways to raise awareness of OA among students, including drama and poetry based OA promotion activities.
• Government officials from the Sudanese Ministry of Communication and the Ministry of Justice, as well as journalists were also introduced to the benefits of OA. The Ministry of Justice is currently discussing strategies for a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to all Sudanese output available online (Creative Commons licenses was one of the approaches being discussed).
• The University of Khartoum’s Faculty of Science IR expanded to become a University of Khartoum OA IR. A productive dialogue was established at University of Khartoum during a one-day training course of 17 librarians and University administrators with regards to depositing materials in the OA IR.
• University of Khartoum created a Digital Content Online Higher Committee and one of its responsibilities includes drafting an OA policy. Three meetings have already taken place and OA policy wording is in progress.
• SUST and EL Neelain universities set up OA repositories (using DSpace FOSS) with the help of an enthusiastic IT engineer at University of Khartoum who installed and customized DSpace for them and trained IT engineers at SUST and El Neelain. Librarians at the three universities were trained by Rania M. H. Baleela on depositing into a DSpace repository. Both events took place under a UNESCO fund that was obtained by the Sudanese Universities Information Network (SUIN) – the national research and education network in Sudan composed of 37 governmental and private universities and institutions – prior to the start of SudHENL.