Research4Life Newsletter July 2013

Published: Tuesday 6th August 2013
Category: News, Partner Newsletter

Table of Contents


Note from the Editor

Welcome to this latest edition of our Research4Life Partner Newsletter. We want to make it possible for you to fully leverage and promote your participation as partners of this impressive access initiative. Read on and find out about the recent milestones, competitions, interviews, outreach and upcoming meetings.
Over the last months we participated in TEDMED in Washington DC, celebrated our 35,000 information resource milestone and congratulated the winner of our librarian case study competition, Onan Mulumba of Makerere University Library in Uganda. Read on to learn more about the winners, the meeting and catch up with Kimberly Parker in her recent interview as HINARI programme manager.
Finally don’t forget to follow us at www.twitter.com/R4LPartnership and ‘like’ us at www.facebook.com/R4Lpartnership! Share the news with colleagues and customers—and help expand our Research4Life community. Interested in getting more involved? We have teams focused on everything from communications to training, technology and impact. Contact us at [email protected] to find out how you can get more involved.

– Ylann Schemm, Chair of the Research4Life Communications and Marketing Team;
Senior Corporate Responsibility Manager, Elsevier


Competition Update and Winner: Librarians Share Impact Experiences from Research4Life
Onan Mulumba, Agricultural Librarian for the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at Makerere University in Uganda was chosen from among 45 highly competitive applicants by a panel of 12 distinguished judges and international experts in the field of research capacity building. As part of the first prize, Onan Mulumba has been invited to serve as the first user to join the Research4Life Executive Council. The prize includes an all-expenses paid trip to attend the Partners’ General Meeting in Rome, Italy in September 2013.
An Honourable Mention for a second case study was awarded to Cynthia Kimani, Librarian at the Kenya Medical Research Institute Library. Cynthia has been invited to attend the annual Research4Life partner meeting and serve on Research4Life’s newly founded library advisory council which provides a forum for direct engagement between the Research4Life partnership and its user community.
“The Research4Life programmes began because we heard and responded to our users’ needs,” said Barbara Aronson, competition judge and founder of HINARI. It’s very gratifying that these two librarians, who have made such an important impact in their institutions, will be continuing our tradition of user voices helping guide our work.”


Research4Life Reaches Milestone of 35,000 Scholarly Resources

Research4Life announced in June that the total number of its offering of information resources has now surpassed 35,000. The total number of journals now tops 13,000, with e-books totaling over 22,000. The Research4Life partnership currently provides over 6,000 institutions in more than 100 developing countries with free or low cost access to peer-reviewed online content from the world’s leading scientific, technical and medical publishers. Read the press release

 


Celebrating AGORA’s 10th Anniversary in Rome at our Partner Meeting

On Monday 16th September, 2013, FAO and its partners will celebrate the tenth anniversary of AGORA – during the Research4Life General Partners Meeting in Rome. The Director-General of FAO is scheduled to speak and there will be a viewing of the most recent video on how AGORA has made a difference in the life of a particular researcher in Burkina Faso. Also on the Agenda, the prize for the Research4Life Library Competition will be awarded, and the winner will share with the audience his testimonial of how AGORA and Research4Life have made a real difference in his university. We anticipate the anniversary celebration to be a vivid commemoration of the enduring partnership between the public and private sectors to respond to the fight against hunger.

 


Announcing the new Research4Life Advisory Council

One of our core strategic objectives outlined in ‘Beyond the 2015 Horizon’ is to ‘Mobilize user communities (ie. librarians, academics, researchers, practitioners, policy makers within eligible countries’ (it’s Goal D.1, to be precise). We have made a further step towards achieving this by forming a new Advisory Council which is meeting for the first time in South Africa on July 5th, alongside the African Library Summit. This new Council includes members from these different constituencies but is mostly made up of academic librarians from institutions across Africa in the pilot phase. The objectives of the Council are to:

  1. Provide a forum for direct engagement between the user community and R4L partnership. To give a more prominent voice to developing country customers with publishing partners in particular.
  2. Support early identification of trends, unmet needs, problems and opportunities from the research and library communities in developing countries.
  3. Increase international exposure and provide opportunities for professional development amongst key stakeholders.
  4. Nurture champions for Research4Life and the research culture within eligible countries.

We have two virtual meetings planned. A press release announcing the membership will be available soon. For more information, contact [email protected].

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Q & A with Kimberly Parker, HINARI Programme Manager at the World Health Organization

In May, Kimberly took some time to talk to us about her pivotal role in developing Research4Life:
Officially I am the Programme Manager for the HINARI programme, which has its “home base” in the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. HINARI is one of four Research4Life programmes, and there are also UN leads for each of the other three programmes.
Unofficially, I am something of an institutional memory for Research4Life, as I became involved in the programmes in 2002 when I worked for Yale University Library, the first partner of HINARI outside of the publisher community. So I suppose I have a certain form of seniority within the group. Having said that, Research4Life is a very organic partnership, and we work almost entirely by consensus and drawing on the skills and knowledge sets of those who enthusiastically volunteer their time or ideas. So, I may be a “centre of gravity” for the partnership, but there are many others who can be described that way as well, and we all work together towards a common goal.
–Read the full article in the May 29th issue of ElsevierConnect.

 


What’s up with Training?

Lenny Rhine, Coordinator of the ‘E-library Training Initiative’; a Librarians Without Borders®/Medical Library Association project funded by the Elsevier Foundation, recently returned from the MLA/International Congress of Medical Librarianship where he held numerous workshops including the HINARI users group and a 5 hour Train the Trainer course which he co- taught with Michael Chimalizeni from ITOCA. The course was oversubscribed with over 35 colleagues receiving a crash course in training. The training equips librarians in Western institutions teaching visiting scholars or librarians’ doing outreach through their institution’s developing world partnerships. Interested in learning more about training? Contact [email protected].


Making a Difference Series: Share Research4Life Impact in Burkina Faso

Dr Sami Hyacinthe Kambire, a researcher from Burkina Faso, shares how Research4Life has helped him to develop better and more informed scientific writing skills, produce focused research that he can discuss with top researchers worldwide, compete more effectively for research funding, and deliver better teaching programmes. Watch the video.

TEDMED/Research4Life Collaboration

TEDMED Live is an extraordinary offering that TEDMED had agreed to give away for free to all the Research4Life institutions so that all participants in R4L had the chance to join the event remotely in real-time or on-demand. As a thank you to all the partners of Research4Life, TEDMED made TEDMEDLive available during the event free of charge 16-21 April. TEDMED also referenced to Research4Life as part of its achievement to simulcast conference globally to 50 countries and 2,500 Organizations. See more.


Donate to Research4Life

We are always asked by partners to suggest different ways that individuals and society members can contribute to Research4life. We are grateful for your current participation, and pleased to offer an additional way to further enhance your support for the developing world. If you or any of your society members would like to contribute funds to training or outreach, you can support Research4Life through http://www.who.int/hinari/donation/en/


Banners, Brochures, Video & More for Research4Life Partners

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” booklet with a quote and logo. For more information, please contact Charlotte Masiello-Riome, Research4Life Communications Coordinator at [email protected]

 

Hinari