Contenido académico y profesional para el mundo en desarrollo

Research4Life Newsletter May 2014

Table of Contents

• Note from the Editor
• “Unsung Heroes: Stories from the Library”
• “Research4Life Partner Meeting July 31st 2014 Washington DC”
• New AGORA Programme Manager
• 10th Anniversary of AGORA
• Mendeley joins Research4Life
• Global Online Access to Law (GOAL)
• Assessing the Impact of Research4Life
• Feedback from our Research4Life Advisory Council
• ITOCA Training Workshops in 2014
• HINARI Trainers Group Nepal
• Marketing Research4Life in Central and West Africa
• Librarians Without Borders: Building the Training Infrastructure
• New Content Management Partner Team
• Research4Life at SSP Annual Meeting
• Collaborative Training Programme with INASP
• Research4Life Latest Stats & Facts
• Promoting Your Research4Life Partnership
• Looking for a Fundraiser? Donate to Research4Life!

Note from the Editor

Welcome to the May 2014 edition of our Research4Life Partner Newsletter. Our goal is to keep you updated on Research4Life’s recent news, upcoming meetings, latest milestones, interviews, and partners. We also want to make it possible for you – as a Research4Life partner – to fully leverage and promote your participation in our impressive access initiative.Help us spread the word – and expand the Research4Life community – by following us on Twitter and ‘liking’ us on Facebook. Interested in getting more involved? We have teams focused on everything from communications to training, technology and impact. Contact us at [email protected]. – Ylann Schemm, Chair of the Research4Life Communications and Marketing Teams and Elsevier Foundation Programme Director

“Unsung Heroes: Stories from the Library”

We are proud to present our latest publication, which shares a critical part of the Research4Life story: Unsung Heroes: Stories from the Library celebrates librarians as the ambassadors of a healthy research culture in the developing world. From our 2013 competition and the recommendations of our twelve international judges, we developed nine case studies. These feature librarians from Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Honduras, and the Maldives and their early identification of trends, challenges and opportunities from research communities in low and middle income countries. The book leads with stories from Onan Mulumba, Agricultural Librarian for the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at Makerere University in Uganda, and Cynthia Kimani, Librarian at the Kenya Medical Research Institute Library. We were honoured to have both of them join us at the September Research4Life General Partners Meeting in Rome to celebrate the 10th anniversary of AGORA. We hope you’ll find the book compelling and share both individual case studies and the entire book with your customers and employees. It provides an excellent opportunity to share your organization’s contribution to the partnership.

Interested in creating a tailored print version with your logo and quote for outreach? Contact [email protected].

Research4Life Partner Meeting July 31st 2014 Washington DC

We will be holding our 2014 General Partners Meeting (GPM) for Research4Life (HINARI, AGORA, OAREand ARDI) on 31st July. As in many years past, it is being generously hosted by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in Washington DC.For those not familiar, the General Partners Meeting is the body which governs our Research4Life partnership and provides an opportunity for every partner to help review the progress, direction and development of the four programmes.

We would like to invite you to join us and help us to continue shaping the programmes through 2015.We hope very much to have a member of the new Advisory Council join us at the meeting as well. At the end of the meeting Emily Gillingham’s role as Chair of the Executive Council will draw to a close and the Chair-elect, Richard Gedye, will take on the mantel. He will be joined by a new – yet to be announced – Chair-elect at that time. We’ll have a chance to thank Emily for her dedicated and excellent contributions to the Executive Council over the past two years. If you’re interested in getting more deeply involved in the partnership and joining us at the upcoming GPM, please contact [email protected].

 

New AGORA Programme Manager

We are pleased to introduce Johannes Keizer as the new AGORA Programme Manager. Since 1998 Johannes Keizer has been working for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN. He heads the team working on Agricultural Information Management Standards and Services. Through the AIMS portal, his team is working on standards, tools and advice for FAOs stakeholders. Some of the main products are AGRIS,the international information system for Agricultural Science and Technology; AGROVOC,the multilingual agricultural concept scheme; the Linked Open Data recommendations for Bibliographic Data;AgriOcean Dspace and AgriDrupal. Now, AGORA and Research4Life are added to this rich portfolio, which is excellent news. Stephen Rudgard, the previous AGORA Programme Manager, has been appointed FAO Representative in Laos effective February 2014. Many thanks to Stephen for his engagement and support to R4L; we wish him all the best in his new endeavor. See Q&A with Stephen Rudgard as AGORA celebrates its 10th anniversary.

10th Anniversary of AGORA

September 2013 marked the 10th anniversary of Research4Life’s AGORA agricultural program –coordinated by FAO, together with major publishers – which provides over 2,300 institutions in over 100 developing countries with free or low-cost access to leading journals in the fields of agriculture, fisheries, food, nutrition, veterinary science and related biological, environmental and social sciences. Last year, the Research4life Library Competition recognized the role of librarians in building research capacity and boosting output among scientists, doctors and policy makers. Onan Mulumba, a librarian at Makerere University in Uganda, won the 2013 competition. He was honoured during the AGORA anniversary celebrations at FAO Headquarters. An Honourable Mention for a second case study was also awarded to Cynthia Kimani, librarian at the Kenya Medical Research Institute Library.

 

 

 

Mendeley joins Research4Life

Mendeley, a global research collaboration platform and academic database, has pledged to collaborate with Research4Life to boost researcher skills in eligible countries. Mendeley’s free cloud-based apps will enable researchers to organize, share and discover new research with other scientists all over the world. Within Research4Life countries, Mendeley currently has thousands of active researcher users and hundreds of global Advisors to help train, educate and increase awareness about how make the most of these research productivity tools.

Jessica L. Reeves, Mendeley’s Head of User Engagement, explains, “We are committed to making researchers aware of our free reference management and academic collaboration tools, educating users through our Resource Center, as well as growing the global Mendeley Advisor community, to support researchers in developing countries. Through this community, we hope to celebrate and promote Research4Life stories of success and collaboration. We really look forward to working with the partnership to further our mission of opening science through technology for all researchers, especially in developing countries.”

 

 

 

 

Global Online Access to Law (GOAL)

Research4Life is committed to extending its partnerships and outreach. This includes exploring new programmes that fit our objectives in Beyond the 2015 Horizon, Research4Life’s strategic plan. Global Online Access to Law (GOAL) proposes to provide free and low cost online access to academic legal content to institutions in developing countries. Key subject areas would include international law and human rights law to help strengthen legal frameworks and institutions in developing countries, while furthering the rule of law. The fulfilment of basic rights is essential for advancing peace and security, and often a prerequisite for economic development. They also enable people to enjoy their full rights as citizens in society. While still in an exploratory phase, GOAL is designed to help strengthen the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which relate to the rule of law (Access to Information and Access to Justice). The SDGs are currently being considered for inclusion by UN working groups as part of the post-2015 development agenda. In short, we are seeking support from publishers, academic institutions, international organizations and funding bodies to GOAL as a new Research4Life programme. If you would like to find out more about GOAL or pledge support as we develop GOAL, contact Liesbeth Kanis, Research4Life liaison for Brill Publishers at [email protected].

Assessing the Impact of Research4Life

Every five years, Research4Life commissions two external reviews of its programmes. One review looks at the programmes from the point of view of the contributing partners, assessing how well the infrastructure and operations are performing. The second review examines the user experience through online surveys and face to face interviews to determine how successfully we’re increasing access to world-leading science and encouraging use. We are currently developing our plans for commissioning our next set of reviews for presentation and discussion at the 2015 General Partners Meeting. By design, these reviews look critically at our infrastructure and performance, highlighting any issues or constraints and proposing ways in which these may be addressed.

This philosophy has proved invaluable over the last 13 years and has led to a succession of improvements in the way we deliver our programmes. To complement these formal reviews, however, we also regularly undertake activities designed to focus on the positive impacts of our programmes. Hence our development and documentation of specific case studies – of individual researchers and practitioners in our recent booklet, Making a Difference: Stories from the field, and of librarians in our new publication, Unsung Heroes: Stories from the Library. In addition, this year we also want to gain wider insight into the positive impacts which our programmes have within our end-user communities by launching a HINARI user impact survey. Our first 2014 survey, which was carried out for us by independent consultancy Information Power, asked HINARI users to tell us how they use the content and to identify whether it enhances the way they conduct research or carry out clinical practice. Information Power is currently analysing the results and we hope to be able to bring you a summary of these in our next newsletter.

Questions about impact analyses or our systematic reviews? Contact Richard Gedye at [email protected].

Feedback from our Research4Life Advisory Council

In 2013, we formed a new Advisory Council which has met quarterly over the past year. The Advisory Council includes academic librarians from institutions across Africa. Our objectives include providing a forum for direct engagement between the user community and the R4L partnership, as well as supporting the early identification of trends, unmet needs, problems and opportunities from the research and library communities in developing countries. We also hope to nurture new Research4Life champions, increase international exposure and provide opportunities for professional development amongst key stakeholders. Please contact Emily Gillingham at [email protected] for more briefings. The Advisory group met most recently on March 27th, with some 10 members of the community. Feedback included: • Addressing the need for customizable posters, banners and materials to hand out in institutions. • Tackling the bandwidth issues on a strategic alliances level; you can’t significantly boost usage if a researcher has to download a PDF article over 5 hours at night in order to do basic research. • Most developing country researchers don’t know R4L, only HINARI or the specific programs. • Lots of great Research4Life marketing discussion with librarians in the Research4Life User Forum. • Many health librarians are not just marketing HINARI internally but also outside their own institutions to community health workers. • Training and outreach is not enough: librarians have to advocate for support directly from management through annual work plans.

ITOCA Training Workshops in 2014

Under the new Research4Life training strategy, ITOCA (Information Training & Outreach Centre for Africa) has delivered two train-the-trainer workshops in Botswana and Nigeria to date and four more courses are planned for 2014 in Ethiopia (May), Uganda (July), Sierra Leone (August) and Tanzania (September). The new training strategy aims to integrate programme awareness, usage and sustainability by providing various mediums for the uptake of the resources beyond the training. The main focus is on getting the buy-in and support from decision makers in the user institutions before a training workshop, as well as inviting university management to the official opening or closing ceremonies, enabling the university leadership to participate in and understand Research4Life’s goals, including the necessity of investing in a solid ICT infrastructure to enable access.

I appreciate the publishers and the management and staff of ITOCA for the initiative, and benefits they have brought to [the] developing world by enhancing teaching and research through provision of quality and up-to-date information.” — Participant, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. The University of Ibadan’s Kenneth Dike Library hosted the Research4Life Nigeria workshop from 24-26 March 2014. The training workshop was formally opened by Dr. Benedict Oladele, the University Librarian. Professor Dele Fawole, the ITOCA Representative for West Africa, emphasised the value of the Research4Life programmes and how they provided access to resources which are often not even available in many Western institutions. The Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic), Professor. A.I. Olayinka also confirmed the University of Ibadan’s support and their willingness to ensure ongoing training for staff and students. ITOCA has found that support from the university management is critical to the continued uptake of the Research4Life and TEEAL programmes.

To learn more, contact Blessing Chataira through [email protected]

HINARI Trainers Group Nepal

In 2007, four health librarians from different institutions across Nepal formed the HINARI Trainers Group. From the beginning their goal has been to stimulate research in the biomedical and health fields and promote the use of HINARI resources through training, a user discussion forum, and developing models for other country user groups.

Since its launch, the Group has conducted 12 training sessions at institutions including the Nepal Health Research Council, Lordbudhha Nursing College, Institute of Medicine.

Nursing College, Manmohan Nursing College, STUPA College, ALKA Nursing College, Norvic Nursing College, Nobel College, ASIAN College, and Chakravarti Nursing College. In 2011, the Nepal Trainers Group was awarded a Research4Life Master Trainer Certificate from the Medical Library Association. This year’s activities include a marketing campaign to spread awareness of HINARI, enhancing internal communication in the group, and setting up distance learning courses to further disseminate HINARI. Interested in learning more? Follow the Nepal HINARI Trainers Group on Facebook.

Marketing Research4Life in Central and West Africa

Historically, West and Central Africa have been low usage areas for Research4Life. Of the 3,000 African institutions registered in 2012, only 300 came from these regions. But in 2013-2014, ITOCA received a targeted marketing grant from the Elsevier Foundation to boost awareness and usage of Research4Life in these countries. In addition to training workshops in DR Congo and Sierra Leone, ITOCA launched an intensive marketing and outreach campaign aimed at the research and academic communities in ten West and Central African focus countries. Letters were sent to thousands of carefully compiled contact people targeting both users and non-users, and ITOCA visited key conferences in the region. For users with questions or problems, the ITOCA staff provided an email, phone and listserv, and dedicated helpdesk service. Due to end in June 2014, the targeted marketing campaign has already reaped significant results. There was a 16% increase in the number of R4L registrations, reaching 427 institutions in March 2014. The highest numbers of new institutions have been registered in DR Congo with 30 institutions (20%) and Niger with 10 institutions (24%). Angola, Chad, Guinea, Liberia and Mauritania have significant new registrations recorded to date and this positive trend is expected to continue upwards as the marketing efforts continue.

Questions? Contact Gracian Chimwaza through [email protected].

Librarians Without Borders: Building the Training Infrastructure

Over the course of 2013, MLA’s Librarians Without Borders® continued their extensive training and curriculum development to enable hundreds of doctors, nurses, librarians and researchers in low and middle income countries to develop the skills they need to use Research4Life resources. In 2013, 252 people from Albania, Macedonia, Samoa, Ethiopia, and Haiti (all low usage countries) were trained through workshops often in collaboration with the WHO, and in Africa, with the Information Training & Outreach Centre in Africa (ITOCA).

These users, many of whom are now trainers in their own right, will help to boost R4L usage over the coming years. Workshops at the University of Florida and at the Medical Library Association meeting last May also helped to develop a new set of US trainers. Direct results include: the University of Southern California set up a HINARI and authorship skills training for all graduate students from eligible countries; Ohio State University established a Research4Life training partnership at the University of Gondor in Ethiopia; while Tulane and Johns Hopkins Universities have established a joint training programme to prepare graduate students returning to eligible countries. Finally, Lenny Rhine also spent a generous portion of 2013 developing and updating the online and onsite training infrastructure behind Research4Life. In 2014, Lenny will work with the ARDI team to create an initial training module, and will also undertake further updates for the three older programs to reflect new software developments and other training needs. The 2012 and January-August 2013 download statistics for HINARI training materials totaled more than 200,000 per year (ca 16,000 per month). This level of usage underscores the importance of these materials for trainers and users, and the necessity of keeping them up-to-date to advance the Research4Life mission. Interested in learning more about Librarians Without Borders? Contact Lenny Rhine through [email protected].

New Content Management Partner Team

Since Research4Life was launched some 13 years ago, a hidden -but integral -part of the programmes has been the management and maintenance of all the details of the journals, databases and books that lie behind the user portals. This is as difficult as it sounds: different academic partners and programme offices have been involved at different points and with varying amounts of time to spend on tasks. Rarely has there been time to actually look at the hows and whys of our database structures, our formats and categories, and our processes and communications. So this year, we’ve formed a task force to step back, review, revise, and update, with an eye towards balancing efficiency with adjustments that could improve the user experience. Questions? Contact Kimberly Parker, Team leader and HINARI Programme Manager, through [email protected].

Research4Life at SSP Annual Meeting

Richard Gedye will be representing Research4Life on a panel session entitled “Publishers and the Developing World: Philanthropy, Partnerships, Markets” at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing on Friday 30 May in Boston. The panel will share what they have discovered about the impact that their current activities are having in target communities and will then respond to a series of questions.

Collaborative Training Programme with INASP

Our collaborative training project in Sierra Leone with INASP is progressing well, with the first workshops taking place next month. The programme will kick off with a series of workshops 1- 8 May in Freetown and Njala, addressed to three separate constituencies: relevant Vice Chancellors and academic leaders; Researchers and Librarians. INASP’s Anne Powell and Research4Life Trainer Lenny Rhine have been working together with local Sierra Leone trainer Miriam Conteh-Morgan to collate appropriate content from our respective training materials into a seamless teaching programme for the workshops.

Research4Life Latest Stats & Facts

• 7700 registered institutions
• 14,500 journals
• 30,000 books
• 185 publisher partners

Latest Research4Life News

• 2014, 7 March Health News NG: Research4Life Programmes Training-of-Trainer Workshop
• 2014, 27 January: Research4Life’s HINARI featured at World Health Organization
• 2014, 9 January: New Authentication Live
• 2013, 23 December: Africa doubles research output over past decade, moves towards a knowledge-based economy – Research Trends
• 2013, 13 November: Watch the FAO webcast on the 10th Anniversary of AGORA from Rome, Italy – FAO Director General José Graziano da Silva
• 2013, 1 November: Wiley blog A new Research4Life Training Strategy in Africa
• 2013, 18 September: FAO United Nations – Food and Agriculture Organization Radio: 10th anniversary of Research4Life’s AGORA agricultural program
• 2013, September: Elsevier Connect, Q&A with Stephen Rudgard as AGORA celebrates its 10th anniversary
• 2013 September: Elsevier Connect Case study: Research4Life and its impact on an agronomist in Burkina Faso
• 2013, 21 August: Research4Life featured in the WHO World Health Report 2013

Promoting Your Research4Life Partnership

Don’t forget, if you are a Research4Life partner, you can access Research4Life promotional materials including logos, web banners, flyers, brochures, boiler plate and presentations, and other information at a special partner-only link. As a partner, you can also choose to customize your Research4Life brochure or the Making a Difference and Unsung Heroes booklets with a quote and logo. For more information, please contact Charlotte Masiello-Riome, Research4Life Communications Coordinator at [email protected].

 

Looking for a Fundraiser? Donate to Research4Life!

We are always asked by partners to suggest different ways that individuals and society members can contribute to Research4life. Don’t forget that Research4Life is also an excellent charity for an office fundraiser. If you or any of your society members would like to contribute funds to Research4Life training or outreach, you can support Research4Life through www.who.int/hinari/donation/en