Category Archives: oa.middle_east

How was the transition to open access advanced in 2022? | Research Information

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“Undoubtedly, 2022 has been a year of growth for open access (OA). Funder policies and deadlines have come into play and, as a result of the pandemic, the impact and benefits of open research and open access are now better understood by people beyond academia. 

Overall, two themes featured strongly – the need for OA take up to become more global and the importance for authors to remain able to publish in their journal of choice. Taken together these themes were instrumental to enabling OA growth in 2022….

And when we look at the policy developments that have taken place this year with a number of countries reviewing their approach to OA and considering policy recommendations to speed up the transition, this move beyond Europe is likely to continue:

US- The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)) has updated the US policy guidance to make the results of taxpayer-supported research immediately available to the American public at no cost

Australia – Australian funding agency, National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), has introduced the requirement that scholarly publications arising from the research it funds be made freely available and accessible

India – the Ministry of Education has announced the deadline for the launch of the “One Nation, One Subscription” (ONOS) policy for scientific research papers and academic journals from April 2023 to ensure countrywide access for researchers and the broader public.

 

Come 2023, we are likely to see even greater take up by authors of OA. Moreover publishers, such as Springer Nature, continue to be ready to work with funders and others to ensure that these policies drive the OA transition in a sustainable way while ensuring the needs of the researchers continue to be met. For a long time we have had the ‘supply’ (the ability to publish OA), what we have been waiting for is the ‘demand’ (authors wanting to publish OA)….”

F.O.R.M. – Panel 3: Open Science Capacity Building in MENA: Plans and Policies – YouTube

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“The Forum for Open Research in MENA (F.O.R.M.) was organised by the Knowledge E Foundation, Knowledge E, and Gulf Conferences, with the support of our Advisory Partner UNESCO, our Host Partner EKB, and our Patron ALECSO. It brought together leading international experts and key regional stakeholders, along with open-source and open-resource solutions and technology providers, to support the advancement of Open Science. F.O.R.M. was held on the 26th-27th of October (2022) to coincide with the global Open Access Week initiative. We hope this will become an annual event hosted in a different country within the MENA region each year.

You can now access speaker presentations on our Zenodo community: https://zenodo.org/communities/forum4… Speakers: Dr. Batool Almarzouq, Honorary research fellow at the University of Liverpool, the lead of the Open Science community Saudi Arabia (OSCSA) and a Content Subject Matter Expert (SME) in NASA’s Transform to Open Science (TOPS) – “NASA’s Transform to Open Science (TOPS): A Toolkit for Fostering Open Science Practices” Dr. Nada Messaikeh (Alliance Manchester Business School) and Reem Jamil Younis (UAE Ministry of Education) – “Open science in education sector research, how can Governments and H.E Institutions collaborate to promote relevance, accessibility, and sustainability of research endeavors?” Dr. Tosin Ekundayo, Synergy University Dubai – “Open Data: A National Data Governance Strategy for Open Science and Economic Development” ”

Digital Library of the Middle East Implements Major Upgrades • CLIR

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“The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), Qatar National Library, and Stanford University Libraries today announced several major improvements to the Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME).

The public, open DLME platform, released in July 2020, aggregates digital records of published materials, documents, maps, artifacts, audiovisual recordings, and more from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Viewers can access nearly 134,000 digital records of materials spanning more than 12 millennia held in museums, libraries, and archives worldwide. The site is fully navigable in Arabic and English….”

Copyright and protection of scientific results: the experience of Russia, the United States and the countries of the Near East

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Abstract. In this article, the authors analyze the legal regulation of the copyright protection of the results of scientific activity in Russia, the United States and the countries of the Near East. Considerable attention is paid to the review of key regulatory acts of the states operating in the designated area, as well as international treaties affecting aspects of the copyright protection of intellectual rights in the field of science. The authors consider the main ways of protecting the scientific results by means of copyright. Special attention is paid to the analysis of the judicial practice of the states, which plays a vital role in defining approaches to the legal regulation of the scientific results. The authors emphasized the similarity and difference between the systems of copyright protection of the results of scientific activity, the role of the judiciary in the functioning of such systems. In the end the conclusion is made about the prospects for harmonization of the approaches to the legal regulation of the results of scientific activity by means of copyright. The article will be relevant to practicing lawyers, researchers, students and everyone who is interested in IP law. 

Qatar National Library joins Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services – The Peninsula Qatar

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“Qatar National Library (QNL) has joined the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS), thus furthering its commitment to helping researchers in Qatar and beyond publish their findings on international publishing platforms. 

The Library was named as a representative of the Middle East on the board of SCOSS as part of its continuing commitment to sharing knowledge and information across the world through open access. The Library will join a network of influential organizations committed to helping secure open access and open science infrastructures worldwide.  These infrastructures include scholarly communication resources, services and software that help researchers collect, store, organize, access, share and assess their research….”

Qatar National Library joins Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services – The Peninsula Qatar

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“Qatar National Library (QNL) has joined the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS), thus furthering its commitment to helping researchers in Qatar and beyond publish their findings on international publishing platforms. 

The Library was named as a representative of the Middle East on the board of SCOSS as part of its continuing commitment to sharing knowledge and information across the world through open access. The Library will join a network of influential organizations committed to helping secure open access and open science infrastructures worldwide.  These infrastructures include scholarly communication resources, services and software that help researchers collect, store, organize, access, share and assess their research….”

Digital Library of the Middle East – DLME

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“The Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME) offers free and open access to the rich cultural legacy of the Middle East and North Africa by bringing together collections from a wide range of cultural heritage institutions. Developed by an engineering team from CLIR and Stanford Libraries, the platform federates and makes accessible data about collections from around the world….”

What’s in a “NAME”? A study of African and Arab journals in the DOAJ – News Service

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“Journal applications are reaching the milestone of 500 titles assessed by the ‘North Africa & Middle East’ (NAME) editor group at DOAJ. This group took over from the former Arabic group in 2016, and I have been honoured to be the editor of this group.

The purpose of the NAME group is to assess as many applications as possible coming from both Arab countries and West Africa, as the regions of former groups had very few applications.

Thanks to the efforts of the 6 volunteering associate editors, we have so far accepted 290 journals and rejected a further 196 applications, for different reasons. The rest of the applications include some completed assessments, 14 are still in progress, and 4 applications were put on hold. In fact, these numbers are very little, a “peanut” comparing to the DOAJ 14267 journals, including 11290 searchable journals at the article level and about 4, 620717 articles altogether from 133 countries. 

Most applications are coming from other (mainly Muslim) countries: Indonesia; and Iran….”

News & Views: Shifting Power Balances in Global Scholarly Output – Delta Think

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“The following figure analyzes the spread of output across major regions, comparing papers published in all journals with those published in fully OA journals….

 

Authors from Asia-Pacific (APAC) account for just under 45% of papers, with Europe a close second and the Americas third. (Total papers in this model amount to just under 2.4 million.)
However, Europe leads in authorship in fully OA journals, covering 52% of output compared with APAC’s 43%. (The model covers just over 500,000 papers in fully OA journals.)…
The top chart shows publications in all journals. Each color represents a different year. We can see that APAC’s share of output is growing, while Western Europe is flatlining and North America lessening.
Share of output in fully OA journals (the bottom chart) shows a slightly different picture. APAC is growing, but in this case, Western Europe’s share is declining, and North America’s share is shrinking even faster.
Smaller economies are growing their share of fully OA faster than they are growing their share of overall output, albeit from lower bases….

By measuring share of output and including overlap between multi-author papers, we can analyze how the “influence” of authors from different regions is changing. As shown above, data confirms the increase in APAC output and the static or decreasing trends in Western Europe and North America, respectively.

The story is much more nuanced when you drill into each country’s contributions. For example, China accounts for a bit less than half (48%) of the APAC region’s influence. While countries such as South Korea, Japan, India, and Australia account for single-digit percentages each, together they are moving the needle, accounting for almost 38% of APAC’s total output….”

A Benedictine monk is helping to save ancient manuscripts in Syria and Iraq–Aleteia

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“Meanwhile, in Iraq, a Dominican priest, Najeeb Michaeel (in photo, center, with Fr. Stewart at left), had already established a center for digitization of Christian manuscripts in the Christian village of Qaraqosh. HMML helped him digitize thousands of Syriac, Arabic, and Armenian manuscripts. In 2014, after the Islamic State group took over Mosul, Michaeel (who is now the Chaldean Archbishop of Mosul) took the precaution of moving the precious manuscripts out of Qaraqosh, even though it was not expected that ISIS would move eastward of Mosul. But they did.

Along with the gruesome treatment ISIS meted out to “infidels” and the destruction it incurred upon places like the Mosul Museum and the ancient city of Palmyra, they also destroyed major manuscript collections in Mosul, “leaving behind only the digital images and a handful of severely damaged volumes,” Fr. Stewart said. “Most collections outside of Mosul, however, had been saved: moved at the last minute, or successfully concealed. This was the case at Mar Behnam Monastery, where some 500 manuscripts were hidden behind a false wall and never discovered during the two-year occupation of the monastery by ISIS. When the monks returned to their now wrecked and defaced monastery, where ISIS had blown up the shrines of the saints to whom the monastery was dedicated, they found the manuscripts intact, safe in their hiding place, a still-beating heart in the battered and bruised body of the cloister.”

Today, HMML has a growing digitized collection of more than 250,000 handwritten books and 50 million handwritten pages. The work is vitally important to helping scholars gain a deeper understanding of ancient cultures, Fr. Stewart said….”

Open Access Journals in the Middle East and Iran

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“Almost 650 journals are currently published in the Middle East (http://applications.emro.who.int/library/imjournals/). Almost two-thirds of these journals are published in Iran (http://journals.research.ac.ir/). Many research institutions publish their own journals. For some incentives, even a single university publishes several journals. For example, currently Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences publishes 62 journals (http://journals.sbmu.ac.ir/site/); Tehran University of Medical Sciences, 57 (http://journals.tums.ac.ir/). This large number of journals published by a scientific institution such as a university in a developing country, is because the raison d’être for scientific publishing in developing countries is quite different from that in developed nations….

All, but a few, of these journals are OA. In fact, almost all biomedical journals published in the Middle East (and many other developing countries) have been published and distributed internationally gratis long before the era of the Internet, online publishing, and the OA movement. They have merely published for enjoying the prestige and bringing promotion credit for the institution and the faculty members. After the introduction of OA movement, nonetheless, another incentive has come into play—making money….”

700 Years of Persian Manuscripts Now Digitized and Available Online | Open Culture

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“For Nowruz, the Persian New Year, the Library of Congress has released a digital collection of its rare Persian-language manuscripts, an archive spanning 700 years. This free resource opens windows on diverse religious, national, linguistic, and cultural traditions, most, but not all, Islamic, yet all different from each other in complex and striking ways….”

The Higher Council for Science and Technology Joins cOAlition S | Plan S

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“The Higher Council for Science and Technology (HCST) from Jordan is the first organisation in the Middle East to join cOAlition S.

HCST was established in 1987 as a public independent institution and acts as a national umbrella for all science & technology activities in Jordan. The objective of the Higher Council is to build a national science and technology base to contribute to the achievement of development goals, through increasing awareness of the significance of scientific research and development, granting the necessary funding and directing scientific and research activities, within national priorities, in line with development orientations.

cOAlition S is thrilled to welcome HCST as the latest member to the growing coalition and looks forward to collaborating with them in the coming months to realise its transformative Open Access plan….”

The Higher Council for Science and Technology is the first organisation in the Middle East who joined cOAlition PLAN S | The Higher Council For Science And Technology (HCST)

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“The Higher Council for Science and Technology is the first organisation in the Middle East who joined cOAlition PLAN S. which is a clear indication of HCST leadership in Science and Innovation Policy….”

OCSDNet – SPARC

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“As open becomes the default for science and scholarship, equity must be intentionally built into the foundation of the emerging new system. Inclusion has to be a central consideration and permanent priority in how we pursue an open system—individually, institutionally, and collectively. To achieve this, communities that are marginalized by our current closed system of scholarly communication need be included as central in planning for the future.

The Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network (OCSDNet) has examined the diversity of modes of scientific discovery and dissemination in the Global South since 2014. The initiative includes 12 research teams working in 26 countries from Lebanon to Cameroon to Costa Rica carrying out projects involving critical issues such as climate change and water quality under a variety of local contexts….

For its contributions to promoting diversity in Open Science and representation of the Global South, the SPARC has honored OCSDNet with its June 2018 Innovator Award….”