Research4Life Partners Newsletter July 2016
Table of Contents
- Note from the Editor
- Hinari 15th anniversary and new look
- Research4Life Annual General Partners Meeting, July 20, New York
- Our Vision for 2020 and Beyond
- INASP/Research4Life Advocacy Campaign
- Update on number of resources available
- Training Highlights
- Website and Social Media update
- Stories of Change
- MLA/Hinari Research4Life Grants
Note from the Editor
Dear Partners,
Did you know that HINARI turned 15 this month? Or that our annual General Partners Meeting is in 2 weeks’ time? Or how about our new advocacy competition with INASP? High time for our partner newsletter. We also think it’s time you were recognized for your contributions to Research4Life. That’s why we’ve created a special “Partner Badge” for you to post on your website and share across your channels. It offers your organization a chance to stand up and be counted for supporting research in developing countries. And the truth is, we also need your help in getting the word out about Research4Life. Why? We don’t just need to boost awareness and usage of all our resources in developing countries, we also want potential funders, policymakers and academia to understand and help us grow our partnership. Our goal is to equip you with the stories, campaigns and facts you need to tell your own story about Research4Life. Have suggestions or want to find out how you can engage your own employees more in Research4Life?
Contact us at [email protected] or come and talk to us at the annual General Partners meeting!
Ylann Schemm, Chair of the Research4Life Communications & Marketing Team and Elsevier Foundation Programme Director
Hinari 15th anniversary and new look
On 9 July 2001, the Hinari programme was formally launched by six founding publisher partners with then WHO Director-General Dr Gro Harlem Brundtlandt witnessing the signatures as they committed themselves to offering freely the full text of their biomedical journals in the developing world. At that time, few could have imagined that Hinari would be active, vibrant and still successful in 2016.
Today, 15 years later, more than 175 publishers participate in Hinari offering tens of thousands of health, biomedical, and related social science literature in more than 100 countries, areas and territories to almost 6000 national health institutions.
With the effort to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals underway, Hinari recognizes that good health is indispensable to poverty reduction and sustainable development. Information and evidence are cornerstones for the robust health systems needed by low- and middle-income countries to create a post-2015 future world.
For fifteen years, Hinari has been opening doors for scientists worldwide. Now it is time to celebrate, and Hinari has a new look with a new logo to take us on to the next fifteen years and beyond.
Happy Birthday Hinari!
General Partners Meeting
This year our Research4Life General Partners Meeting will be held in New York on Wednesday 20 July 2016, at Cornell University’s Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City – at 1300 York Avenue, New York, NY 1006. It promises to be a full day of updates, new avenues and discussion with a special focus this year on the presentation of Research4Life’s new strategic plan, which outlines our strategic priorities for the next five years and beyond. The plan was developed following a two-day strategic retreat in October 2015 attended by some 30 delegates from our publishing community, the UN agencies, US university libraries, STM, and a user representative from the University of Namibia. We hope that you or a colleague from your organisation, will be able to join us in New York on 20 July.
Please contact [email protected] if you plan to attend.
Our Vision for 2020 and Beyond
After hard work in the past October strategic retreat, a new report, “Our vision for 2020 and Beyond: Research4Life’s Strategic Plan” comes to life with new and updated objectives in line with the 2015 user experience and infrastructure reviews. The document presents the objectives and goals that the partnership aims to achieve beyond 2020. The document will be launched and shared at the General Partners Meeting in New York.
INASP/Research4Life Advocacy Campaign
Remember Unsung Heroes and Making a Difference? Well, it’s time for new stories! Together with INASP, an international charity working to build research ecosystems in developing countries, we launched a global case study competition to spotlight how users in the developing world have successfully advocated for a sustainable
research culture. Our goal is to pull in compelling new stories, which recognize the critical role, that doctors, researchers, librarians and policymakers play in advocating their leaders to support research in their institutions and countries. In short, we want to know how our users have overcome hurdles to boost critical leadership support to improve evidence based health care, agriculture and environmental policies as well as basic research in their countries.
Dates: The competition deadline is September 15th. Case studies will be reviewed by a committee of distinguished international partners from the INASP and Research4Life communities.
Find more information here: http://www.research4life.org/research4life-inasp-advocacy-competition/ or contact [email protected] if you want to get involved or know of a good example.
Update on number of resources available
We are pleased to announce a new update in the number of online resources available through the Research4Life programmes. In the last 18 months, the total count of material has risen up to 69,000, an increase of 42% from the previous count of 48,000. The new number of resources includes new titles added to books, journals and other information material in the collections of the four Research4Life programmes –Hinari, AGORA, OARE and ARDI-.
It has been a busy six months for Research4Life training activities, many with key partners: Librarians Without Borders, MLA, Elsevier Foundation and ITOCA. Hinari workshops and training have been delivered in Moldova, Honduras, Nepal, Bangladesh, Papua New Guinea, Viet Nam and Rwanda. ARDI held a workshop in Botswana. FAO/AGORA held workshops in Namibia, Tanzania, Myanmar and Bolivia. Twenty-eight TEEAL-AGORA Training of the Trainer Workshop have also taken place. Librarians Without Borders and Hinari have done shorter workshops in the USA, a valuable outreach to intermediaries.
Looking ahead, Hinari workshops are coming up in Bhutan and Cote d’Ivoire, a Sub-Regional Workshop is planned in Jordan (for Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Yemen and West Bank and Gaza Strip). AGORA training workshops are planned for Ghana, Nicaragua, Zimbabwe and Bangladesh.
For online training, AGORA is developing a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on “Access to scientific information resources in agriculture in low-income countries”, and Hinari is working on a pilot Master Trainer course. Three general Research4Life webinars were also delivered (English, French and Spanish) in collaboration with the Communications team.
Website and Social Media update
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[su_column size=”1/3″][fbvideo link=”https://www.facebook.com/R4Lpartnership/videos/1314311181928801/” width=”200″ height=”200″ onlyvideo=”1″][/su_column]
[su_column size=”2/3″]Since our past newsletter in November 2015 our web audience keeps on growing as well as our social media community. We are working on different strategies to engage more users with the content offered through the website such as short videos news on social media, training resources in different languages, promotional material to libraries and information updates from our publisher’s partners on our blog.
During the past quarter the Research4Life site received almost 9,000 users per month, an increase of 18% compared to the previous period. More than 7,000 users are now part of our Social Media community across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Visit us and share our updates.[/su_column]
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Thanks to an Elsevier Foundation grant we were able to develop a series of small stories from librarians and researchers in Bangladesh and Myanmar in the frame of the Hinari and AGORA workshops in Dhaka and Yangon. The stories will be released at the next General Partners Meeting as the start of our “Stories of Change” project. Despite our constraints in the marketing and communication budget we will still develop another small series for the “Stories of Change” project thanks to a partnership with Oxfam’s Assar project. The stories are planned to be launched by the end of the year. If you would like to participate in the project please contact [email protected]
MLA/Hinari Research4Life Grants
The Elsevier Foundation is also supporting Research4Life with a series of grants aiming to train a new group of Hinari instructors and develop training activities. This will be possible through the MLA HINARI/Research4Life Grant. The grant focuses on training activities for the Research4Life programs. This expansion reflects a decade-long commitment of Elsevier and the Elsevier Foundation to fund the Medical Library Association and Librarians Without Borders to provide essential training to boost Research4Life usage in developing countries.
The first call for applications was sent last March and closed on June 15th. MLA will be able to offer small grants (1,500$ to 6,000$) for the next three years. The funded projects will center on training for Hinari and developing additional instructors.
