User:Filippo Morsiani/Open access in Sudan

Open Access in Sudan; Currently there are four OA digital repositories in Sudan which are registered in OpenDOAR. The Sudanese Association of Libraries and Information Library English Literature Collection (SALI) is a Greenstone-based repository providing access to the conference outputs of the institution. Items are available in English and Arabic. The interface is also available in English and Arabic. The Sudan Open Archive (SOA) is designed and implemented by the Kenya and UK-based Rift Valley Institute, working with institutional partners in the north and south of Sudan. The Archive was created by DL- Digital Library Consulting using open-source Greenstone archive software developed by the New Zealand Digital Library project at the University of Waikato offering free digital access to knowledge about all regions of Sudan. SOA 3.0, includes two new special collections: the first thirty-two volumes of Sudan Notes and Records, Sudan’s flagship scholarly journal, and the collected papers of the late Sudanese scholar, Richard Gray. It is maintained with support from the J.M. Kaplan Fund. Other partners include UNICEF, UNEP and the Southern Sudan Centre for Census, Statistics and Evaluation. Other OA repositories in Sudan include DSpace at Sudan University of Science and Technology (SUST), Khartoum Space (University of Khartoum Digital Repository) and Neelain- DSpace from Al Neelain University.

There are currently no OA mandates registered in ROARMAP.

Enabling Environment

The University of Khartoum (UofK) will be having an Institutional Repository so researchers affiliated with its Faculty of Science will be able to comply with these Open Access policies by simply depositing a copy of their research papers at DSpace@ScienceUofK, either directly (via self-archiving) or with help from the repository managers (mediated deposit).

According to ITU (International Telecommunication Union) with a population of 45,047,502, Internet users grew from 30,000 in 2000 to 4,200,000 in 2011, it implies that 9.3 percent of the population has an internet access.

Potential Barriers

Poor ICT infrastructure and Low level of awareness of the potentials of Open Access amongst organizations that sponsor research activities in Sudan.

Major Projects/Initiatives

EIFL has been working in Sudan since 2003. EIFL engaged with the Sudanese Research and Education Network SudREN (previously SUIN), and through this partnership, libraries in Sudan are providing access to a wide range of scholarly e-resources. In 2014, Sudanese Universities Library Consortium (SULC) has been established.

In 2011-2013 EIFL provided financial support to 34 projects that implemented national and institutional open access (OA) advocacy campaigns to reach out to research communities and OA publishing initiatives.Through small grants and support from their own institutions, the projects engaged in a wide variety of campaigns and activities, including: holding workshops, creating websites, building institutional OA repositories, creating e-learning courses, and implementing OA publishing platforms. A new 2012 EIFL project planned to extend [null Dspace(at)ScienceUofK] to become the University of Khartoum’s OA institutional repository (IR) and conduct awareness-raising campaigns among students and researchers across three significant institutions in Sudan: the University of Khartoum, the leading higher education and research institution in Sudan that produce over a half of the Sudanese research output; Sudan University of Science and Technology (SUST), the first and leading polytechnic university in the country; and El Neelain University whose enrollment includes a large number of distance learning students.

Key achievements:

Successfully engaged undergraduate students and young researchers to become new, major stakeholders in the project. The students created a SudHENL Facebook page and also provided feedback for innovative ways to raise awareness of OA among students, including drama and poetry based OA promotion activities.
Government officials from the Sudanese Ministry of Communication and the Ministry of Justice, as well as journalists were also introduced to the benefits of OA. The Ministry of Justice is currently discussing strategies for a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to all Sudanese output available online (Creative Commons licenses was one of the approaches being discussed).
The University of Khartoum’s Faculty of Science IR expanded to become a University of Khartoum OA IR. A productive dialogue was established at University of Khartoum during a one-day training course of 17 librarians and University administrators with regards to depositing materials in the OA IR.
University of Khartoum created a Digital Content Online Higher Committee and one of its responsibilities includes drafting an OA policy. Three meetings have already taken place and OA policy wording is in progress.
SUST and EL Neelain universities set up OA repositories (using DSpace FOSS) with the help of an enthusiastic IT engineer at University of Khartoum who installed and customized DSpace for them and trained IT engineers at SUST and El Neelain. Librarians at the three universities were trained by Rania M. H. Baleela on depositing into a DSpace repository. Both events took place under a UNESCO fund that was obtained by the Sudanese Universities Information Network (SUIN) – the national research and education network in Sudan composed of 37 governmental and private universities and institutions – prior to the start of SudHENL.

OASCIR is a 10-month project aiming to promote awareness of Open Access-related issues among the U of K researchers, scholarly community, librarians and beyond. It is funded by EIFL.net.. This project started on March 2011 and two training courses on Open Access and the IR management were scheduled for the end of July- funding of the Project and of this specific training activity respectively by EIFL-OA and the Carlos III University Madrid. See also OASCIR Project blog

The Open University of Sudan (OUS) is a partner with The Open University (UKOU) in the project Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa Project (TESSA). It brings together teachers and teacher educators from across Africa. It offers a range of materials (Open Educational Resources) in four languages to support school based teacher education and training.

National and Institutional Level Policies/Mandates

Many current funding agencies operating in Sudan have established some kind of Open Access policy, by which the research results of such funding (that is mainly research papers) should be made available Open Access within 6 or 12 months from its publication on a research journal.

Details of Key Organizations

Open University of Sudan (OUS), In pursuit of the desire to liberate higher education from the limitations of time and place, the Sudanese Council of Ministers founded the Open University of Sudan (OUS) in 2002. OUS is a partner with The Open University (UKOU) in the project Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa Project (TESSA).

Sudan Libraries & Information Association

Past and Future OA Related Activities

Open Access Anthropology in Africa is a multilingual anthropology portal with news blogs in English, German and Norwegian posted an introduction to Open Access Anthropology in Africa highlighting the anthropology related papers in Sudan Open Archive

A Workshop on Digital Libraries was held during 14 –18 December 2002 in Khartoum, Sudan, by Sudan British Council in collaboration with Documentation and Information Centre of National Centre for Research and Sudatel Training Centre, entitled ”The Impact of Ncr-Dic Readiness In Realizing Sudan Digital Library” By Rafaa Ashmallah Ghobrial.

Free publishing and access opportunities with the Oxford Journals, Oxford Open initiative on 14 Jul 2009, it includes full and optional open access across more than 70 journals in every subject area. For each of the Oxford Journals that offers an open access model listed here authors in the developing countries.

Open Access awareness-raising campaign among researchers at the Faculty of Science, University of Khartoum (UofK) implemented by the Faculty of Science, University of Khartoum Library with the partner: GrandIR, CB, a Carlos III University Madrid and launched this blog.

In April 2011, Sudan was amongst the five winner projects presented in Africa in the EIFL call for proposals: Open access advocacy campaigns. EIFL provided financial support to 11 projects - national and institutional open access advocacy campaigns to reach out to research communities: five projects in Africa (Botswana, Ghana, Malawi, Sudan and Zimbabwe)

Report from the OASCIR Training Week (Jul 24-30th). Along the week from Jul 24^th to 30^th, a series of training courses and dissemination activities on Open Access and the DSpace@ScienceUofK pilot Institutional Repository (IR) were held at the University of Khartoum (UofK) in the framework of the eIFL.net-funded OASCIR Project (Open Access Scientific Institutional Repository).

Sources

This article incorporates text from a free content work. Licensed under CC-BY-SA IGO 3.0 (license statement/permission). Text taken from Global Open Access Portal, UNESCO. UNESCO. Sudan Category:Sudan