Research4Life Partners Newsletter May 2017
Table of Contents
- Note from the Editor
- Next Research4Life Partners Meeting
- Launching the “Stories of Change”
- Meet our new Research4Life user representative Chandra Bhushan Yadav
- ECS Partners with Research4Life
- Capacity Development Team Highlights
- ITOCA delivers Research4Life/TEEAL Online Courses
- Librarians Without Borders
- 10,000 Followers, 20,000 views and more media updates
- Latest Stats and Facts
- In the news
Note from the Editor
Dear Partners,
This month we hit an exciting milestone—10,000 followers on social media channels. What I find impressive is that our dynamic online community was built from scratch just a few years ago. It pays testimony to the work that our partners and users have done to build awareness about our over 80,000 peer reviewed resources and what it can mean for them and their societies. Around the world, researchers, librarians, doctors and policymakers are steering a quiet revolution in evidence-based policymaking across all sectors including healthcare, agriculture, climate change and innovation. Our 2016 joint competition with INASP has proven a powerful way to collect some of these stories of impact and we’re looking forward to sharing these with you in the coming months.
Read on to learn more about our upcoming Partners Meeting, our exciting new “Stories of Change campaign” and the impressive training work our capacity development team has undertaken in a dizzying number of countries. Interested in getting more involved or telling the Research4Life story from your own organization?
Contact us at [email protected]
Ylann Schemm, Chair of the Research4Life Communications & Marketing Team and Director, Elsevier Foundation and External Partnerships
Next Research4Life Partners Meeting
Only July 12th, we look forward to welcoming our partners to the Research4Life General Partners Meeting (GPM) in Oxford. Our meeting will coincide with the separate annual Publishers for Development Conference, a joint INASP/ Association of Commonwealth Universities initiative, held on the preceding day, July 11th, to enable attendees to make the most of both events. The General Partners Meeting is the body which governs our Research4Life partnership and provides an opportunity for every partner to help inform the progress, direction and development of the four programmes.
We also look forward to welcoming the two winners from our 2016 Research4Life/INASP advocacy competition: Alice Matimba, a clinical pharmacologist from Zimbabwe and Mary Acanit, a technical librarian from Uganda. Many thanks to Elsevier, INASP, SAGE and Taylor & Francis for the travel grants and prizes, which helped make this possible. In addition, we look forward to welcoming our two Research4Life Executive Council user representatives and University library consortia representatives from Bangladesh, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, and Zimbabwe. We hope you will join us and help us to continue shaping the programmes through 2018.
Launching the “Stories of Change”
This month we are pleased to present “Stories of Change”, a series of multimedia stories, experiences and reflections collected during the past year from our Research4Life users around the world. Our first “Story of Change” is about Yu Yu Tin, the head librarian at the Universities Central Library in Yangon who is working to modernize the biggest academic library in Myanmar.
Meet our new Research4Life user representative Chandra Bhushan Yadav
We’d like to introduce our new user representative Chandra Bhushan Yadav. Mr. Bhushad serves as the Library and Information Officer for the Nepal Health Research Council, a governmental organization that promotes scientific study and quality research.
Mr. Bhushan has conducted numerous Hinari training sessions for PhD, MPH, Masters of Pharmacy, Nursing and undergraduate students and health practitioners across health-related academic institutions in Kathmandu and other regions of Nepal. Several of the larger regional workshops have been supported by funding from Research4Life, The World Health Organization, South-East Asia Regional Office – SEARO or Nepal’s National Health Education, Information and Communication Centre (NHEICC).
Welcome to the partnership!
ECS Partners with Research4Life
ECS is partnering with Research4Life to provide accessibility to over 132,000 articles and abstracts published in the ECS Digital Library. ECS or The Electrochemical Society aims to advance theory and practice at the forefront of electrochemical and solid-state science and technology, and allied subjects. All papers published by ECS, including articles in their flagship journal, Journal of The Electrochemical Society, will be free to access for Research4Life’s more than 8,200 registered institutions. More information: http://www.research4life.org/ecs-partners-research4life-help-close-knowledge-gap-developing-world/
Capacity Development Team Highlights
The Capacity Development team has been busy! We’ve held training workshops in Laos (AGORA and Hinari), in Jordan, Nicaragua, Papua New Guinea and Ghana (Hinari), Zimbabwe and Nicaragua (AGORA), and ARDI workshops in Nigeria and Uganda. In addition, we’ve offered shorter Hinari courses in Nigeria, Honduras, the US and Tanzania. ITOCA TEEAL/AGORA courses were also delivered in Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Nigeria and Uganda. Finally, All Hinari training materials now have this license: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, as will Research4Life-level materials, to encourage wider sharing.
ASIRA Online Course-AGORA
The first edition of the AGORA e-learning course “Access to scientific information resources in agriculture in low-income countries” (ASIRA) has concluded, with 60 people enrolled and with webinars on Research4Life/AGORA, TEEAL and more.
ITOCA delivers Research4Life/TEEAL Online Courses.
During the past year, ITOCA introduced a pilot Research4ife/TEEAL Master Trainer course, which saw 30 Africans from six different countries participating. The objective of the course was to empower these ‘Master trainers’ with the skills necessary to confidently conduct TEEAL and AGORA training session(s) at their institutions. The second round of Research4ife/TEEAL online training is currently taking place in May 2017 and the fourth Research4Life intake is scheduled for October 2017.
MLA Librarians without Borders® (LWB) is working to create a cadre of dedicated Research4Life trainers around the world. Launched in 2016, new training grants to help achieve this goal are an expansion of LWB’s E-library Training Initiative led by University of Florida Emeritus, Lenny Rhine who has conducted Hinari/R4L training and developed materials with support from the Elsevier Foundation since 2007. Over the past 10 months, eight colleagues were awarded Librarians Without Borders®/Elsevier Foundation Reseach4Life Training grants, funding workshops in Ethiopia, Ghana, Guatemala, Honduras, Tanzania and Vietnam as well as training videos and other materials and workshops for health and agriculture librarians in sub-Saharan Africa. A 2018 call for proposals has been launched with a 1 December deadline. For further information on the application process and funded proposals: http://www.mlanet.org/page/lwb
10,000 Followers, 20,000 views and more media updates
We have reached an impressive milestone of 10,000 followers on our social media! We have been working for the past few years to grow our online community through steady engagement across our social media channels which include: Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. Are you following us?
Our Research4Life website is also growing steadily. With more than 20,000 views per month we make sure that our site is dynamic with lots of new content from our partners and initiatives such as the new “Stories of Change” site and a dedicated page for all of our Research4Life Booklets including “Making a Difference”, “Unsung Heroes” and the soon to be launched Research4Life/INASP Advocacy Stories.
Does Online Access Promote Research in Developing Countries? Empirical Evidence from Article-Level Data: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2870617
Digital resources in developing world libraries: supporting research needs and increasing usage:
