Open Access Advocacy at Sudan Higher Education Institutions National Level (SudanHENL)
The SudanHENL case study describes the open access advocacy campaign involving three higher educational institutions in Sudan that decided to collectively partner in raising open access awareness in their respective institutions. The three institutions are the University of Khartoum, Sudan University of Science and Technology (SUST) and El Neelain University.In Sudan, before 2011, there were no OA repositories and there was very little appreciation of Open Access as a tool of scholarly communication. The successful launch of the DSpace@ScienceUofK, an open access institutional repository at the University of Khartoum’s Faculty of Science funded by the EIFL in 2011 marked a watershed year in the development of Open Access in Sudan. Due to the success of DSpace@ScienceUofK, it was decided to extend this repository to be the University of Khartoum’s Institutional Repository.
This awareness campaign produced notable results which included:-
- Creation of a SudHENL Facebook page and drama and poetry based OA promotion activities as a means of providing feedback for innovative ways to raise awareness of OA among students.
- Advocacy activities targeting Government officials from the Sudanese Ministry of Communication and the Ministry of Justice; sparking further debate on strategies for a simple standardized way of granting copyright permissions to all Sudanese output available online.
- SUST and EL Neelain universities set up OA repositories (using DSpace FOSS) with the help of an IT engineer at University of Khartoum who installed and customized DSpace for them and trained IT engineers at SUST and El Neelain
Read more about this at http://www.eifl.net/system/files/201302/sudan-oa-case-study-final_2013.pdf
