Research4Life Partners Newsletter October 2017

Published: Thursday 26th October 2017
Category: Partner Newsletter

Table of Contents

Note from the Editors

 

Dear Partners,

We are on the cusp of an exciting new chapter for Research4Life. As we gear up to launch GOALI, our 5th programme focused on the rule of law early next year, we have been hard at work boosting our infrastructure and sharing the stories behind Research4Life, highlighting the incredible work being done every day by researchers, librarians, doctors, policymakers and activists in the developing countries.

During the past few months, we launched Information in Action, a new book of case studies with INASP, our research capacity building partner. We also hosted the Research4Life Partners meeting in Oxford this summer and got to see many of you in person and share our “Stories of Change” videos featuring some of our most enterprising users.

We also made a good many improvements to our infrastructure, launching a new authentication system, boosting collections and capacity building to improve the overall experience of our users. Read on to find out more about the latest events in the Research4Life community, our media stats and facts and recent training outreach. Feel free to share the news across your networks and of course, we welcome you to get more involved. Whether your interest is in impact, fundraising, governance, capacity development, technology, marketing or communications, there’s a Research4Life team for you. Contact us at [email protected]

Ylann Schemm (The Elsevier Foundation) and Karna Wegner (FAO)
Co-chairs, Research4Life Communications & Marketing Team

Research4Life Partners Meeting Highlights

 

The Research4Life annual General Partners Meeting held in Oxford on 12 July 2017 brought together some 65 delegates and observers representing the publishing community, United Nations agencies, university libraries, and a number of representatives from the Research4Life user community.

Apart from updates on all aspects of Research4Life and its programmes, the meeting featured a session on upstream advocacy for strengthened research capacity in the developing world. Anne Powell (INASP) and Ylann Schemm (Elsevier) presented the stories from the INASP/Research4Life advocacy competition winners Alice Matimba (University of Zimbabwe) and Mary Acanit (Kyambogo University, Uganda).

Our new publication Information in Action: Celebrating Research Advocacy Champions, was launched in conjunction with the advocacy session. This publication provides a series of motivating exemplars for others in the communities that Research4Life serves. We hope that this publication will be a good ambassador for our respective initiatives as well as providing a series of motivating exemplars for others in the communities we serve.

One of the highlights of the meeting was a panel discussion with international librarians from Lesotho (Dr Matseliso Moshoeshoe-Chadzingwa) , Bangladesh (Nazim Uddin and Farzana Sultana) and Kenya (Humphrey Keah). They discussed some of the issues faced by librarians in both developed and developing countries and recommended actions for greater investment in local research capacity.

Chandra Bhushan Yadav, Library/Information Officer at Nepal Health Research Council gave an inspiring and insightful presentation on the growth and impact of the Nepal Health Research Council through the resources provided through Research4Life and INASP.

Finally, the meeting also saw the formal approval of GOALI (Global Online Access to Legal Information) as the fifth programme under the Research4Life umbrella.

GOALI presentation and future launch 2018

 

A new Research4Life programme, GOALI (Global Online Access to Legal Information) will join the Research4Life partnership and will be launched in February 2018. GOALI will provide free or low cost online access to law and law-related academic and professional peer-reviewed content to government and not-for profit institutions in more than 115 low- and middle-income countries.

Main beneficiaries will include researchers, librarians, policymakers, judges and legal experts from governments, universities, law schools, research and not-for- profit institutions as well as secretariats of national workers’ and employers’ organizations. Eligibility for access is defined by Research4Life, the broader development partnership.

Information in Action: Celebrating Research Advocacy Champions

 

The new Research4Life booklet “Information in Action: Celebrating Research Advocacy Champions” was presented during the Research4Life partners meeting in Oxford. This joint effort with INASP showcases the best stories from the 2016 Research4Life/INASP Advocacy Competition.

The two winners, Alice Matimba —whose multidisciplinary team successfully advocated for a health policy that has transformed the care and treatment offered to patients diagnosed with diabetic retinopathy and other eye complications—and Mary Acanit —whose management team successfully advocated for the connection of Kyambogo University to the Research and Education Network for Uganda (RENU) — were awarded during the advocacy for strengthened research capacity in the developing world panel.

Each of the other seven stories in the booklet will be published on the Research4life website during the next months. Don’t miss the opportunity to experience and share these inspiring stories.

 


New Authentication system

Research4Life has launched a new authentication system. This new environment has addressed many of the access problems we have had in recent years, including the issues caused by many publishers’ move to secure web communications.

For our users, it has meant that any previous direct URLs or bookmarks for the login pages of the Research4Life individual programmes needed to be corrected to the new authentication login page.

We’d like to highlight one new major improvement in the new authentication system: users can now access all of the Research4Life programmes their institution has registered for with one UserID. In addition, we will soon be implementing an IP-based login enabling fixed IP addresses to be recognized in place of institutional usernames and passwords. With these critical, user-friendly upgrades, our aim is to further boost usage across Research4Life institutions.


Capacity Development Team Highlights

Click to go to the Research4Life workshops 2016-2017

Several training workshops have been held in in Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Sudan and Uganda (Hinari) and in the United Republic of Tanzania (AGORA). In addition, there were shorter courses in Bangladesh and the US (Hinari/Librarians Without Borders). ARDI has held workshops on Patent Search Strategies and Techniques and on Establishing Technology and Innovation Support Centers (TISCs) in Guinea, Uzbekistan, Cameroon, Jamaica and the Central African Republic. The second and third editions of the AGORA e-learning course “Access to scientific information resources in agriculture in low-income countries” (ASIRA) have concluded. Since its first round, the ASIRA course gathered 329 enrolled users from 66 countries. Finally, all the Hinari and OARE training materials have been updated.

Coming up in next months: workshops in Egypt, Kenya, Malawi, Republic of Moldova and Mozambique. In addition, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) has engaged ITOCA to lead eight workshops for their MSc and PhD funded scholars in Tanzania, Ethiopia, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Sudan and Mozambique, September-December 2017. The workshops will see the training of around 200 scholars, and include resources via the Research4life programmes. AGORA Team has developed a specific online course about AGORA for their users and interested people in eligible countries. Additionally another edition of the AGORA e-learning course “Access to scientific information resources in agriculture in low-income countries” (ASIRA) will be conducted.


Elsevier adds Clinicalkey to Research4life

In June 2017, Elsevier, the information analytics company specializing in science and health, added ClinicalKey to its existing global research and health resources available through Research4Life. ClinicalKey will equip doctors with an intuitive search engine to quickly distill evidence-based answers from Elsevier’s database of clinical content. Dr. Kristina Krohn, a Health Frontiers field representative in Laos, noted the effect this had on doctors she work with,

The joy on the Lao doctors’ faces the first time they had access to medical journal articles through Hinari was better than watching a kid in a candy store. They devoured everything. Hopefully, ClinicalKey can help them sort through the medical literature without getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information available.

Read more about ClinicalKey: Putting ClinicalKey in doctors’ hands through Research4Life’s developing country access


Librarians Without Borders

Launched in 2016, The MLA Librarians without Borders® / Elsevier Foundation/ Research4Life Grants support Hinari/R4L training activities that promote the use of the programs’ scientific research resources in emerging/low income countries. The grants benefit the users in the eligible countries as these individuals will obtain skills to effectively and efficiently use the Hinari/R4L resources and become a training resource for their institutions or country.

For 2017 five recipients have been awarded with grants:

Israel Mbekezeli Dabengwa, Library, National University of Science and Technology, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe

Irena G. Dryankova-Bond, Blais Family Library, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy & Health Science–Worcester, USA

Nguyen Hai Ha, Library and Information Center, Hanoi University of Public Health, Hanoi, Vietnam

Lydia Hull Witman, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, University of Virginia–Charlottesville, USA

Sarah Young, Mellon Institute Library, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

The 2018 call for proposals is open. For further information on the application process and funded proposals: http://www.mlanet.org/page/lwb


Stories of Change: Bangladesh

A new set of stories from the “Stories of Change” series from Bangladesh will be launched next month. The first story is about Nazim Uddin, Librarian at the ICDDRB in Dhaka. He is a Hinari focal point and enthusiastic advocator for the use of medical information. He has modernized a medical library serving hundreds of doctors and researchers in the slums of Dhaka. Stay tuned to discover more about this inspiring story.

“Stories of Change” were made possible through a grant from the Elsevier Foundation.


New “Voices” site

 

Since the beginning of the Research4Life partnership more than 15 years ago, thousands of researchers, librarians, students and health practitioners have shared their experiences with us on using our resources. We, in turn, have shared their stories through case studies, competitions, interviews, videos and testimonials helping to bring home the impact that access to information has around the world.

To make our stories more visible and accessible, we have created a new space called “Voices” that gathers more than 50 inspiring stories from across the Research4Life community. This new site comprises the new Stories of Change series, our three booklets and our videos.

Take a look at our new site and share it with your networks!

 

New Marketing material update

 

A new set of marketing material is now available for users and partners to download. These products help to promote Research4Life and its programmes and include a variety of resources including Brochures, Web Banners, Posters, Infographics and the Research4Life badge. Librarians will be able to make use of customizable products to organize their workshops.

 


Numbers of resources update

Hinari