Over the last two decades we have worked together with INASP to close the information gap between developed and developing countries by providing free or low cost access to academic, scientific, and professional peer-reviewed content online and providing the necessary training to support researchers, practitioners, librarians and authors in building viable research ecosystems. In order to highlight the critical role that doctors, researchers, librarians and policymakers play in advocating their leaders to support research in their institutions and countries, we have joined efforts with INASP to run the 2016 Research4Life/INASP advocacy competition. The competition calls for case studies demonstrating how users have overcome hurdles to boost critical leadership support for the information and infrastructural resources needed to improve evidence based health care, agriculture and environmental policies as well as basic research in their countries. So we would like to know whether you as a user, librarian, or other stakeholder have successfully advocated “upstream” for support for the research enterprise in your particular institution or country.

• Have you been successful in efforts to make increased resources available, either in the form of funding for the conducting of research, funding for acquiring access to critical journals, books, or databases, or for improving the quality and quantity of the technological infrastructure and equipment provision in your institution?
• More challengingly have you ever been able to advocate for a more evidence based local or national government policy based on external research to which you have had access or indeed research which you yourself have carried out?

If you can answer “Yes” to any of these questions, why not enter our new competition. It is designed to highlight and honour examples of successful advocacy in support of improving research capacity within your institution or country or the deployment of research results to achieve evidence based policy development at either local or national level.

Eligibility: The competition is open to all researchers, practitioners, librarians and library staff whose institution is either a registered user of one of the Research4Life programmes - Hinari, AGORA, OARE and ARDI – or who have access to online journals or books as a result of deals intermediated via INASP.

Deadline:  September 15th 2016

Judges:  Case studies will be reviewed by a committee of distinguished international partners from the INASP and Research4Life communities.

Prizes: Elsevier will provide the winner with a travel grant to the 2017 Publishers for Development conference in the U.K, SAGE Publishing has offered a one year subscription to a major reference work and Taylor & Francis will provide an honourable mention award.

Submissions: Submission form available soon.

For more information send an email to [email protected]

This competition is kindly supported by: