The EIFL-OA programme invites proposals for organising national or institutional open access advocacy campaigns to reach out to research communities. We particularly wish to involve scholarly and scientific researchers, universities and colleges, and university presses and society publishers.

Some examples of the advocacy actions that could be implemented in partnerships with senior management and open access champions from the faculty:

• expanding  educational materials on open access targeted toward researchers;
• preparing and distributing open access brochures along with supporting web and multimedia materials;
• using new media to educate researchers about open access and share best practices;
• presentation series at faculty meetings;
• hosting workshops and events;
• collaborating with university presses and scholarly societies on campus-based publishing partnerships;
• developing case studies to illustrate successful open access projects;
• promoting the adoption of campus-based, faculty-driven open access policies;
• collecting success stories, forming collaborations and networks that can deliver joint advocacy efforts;
• building national communities of Open Access practitioners.  

Application procedure



Proposals should:

• Provide an overview of current open access activities in your country and institution.
• Describe your advocacy strategy: how do you plan to reach out to research communities.
• Describe your project work plan and time frame. Note that the duration of the grant can be from 3 to 10 months.
• Describe how your advocacy work will improve the current situation or how it will add to the evidence base.
• Describe your goals and the measurement(s) of success that you will use.
• Provide a budget to support your action plan. Note that EIFL financial contribution is limited up to 4,000 USD.
• Be written in English.
• Application deadline is February 28th, 2011.

If you are looking for examples of successful advocacy campaigns, please see the following websites:

• Open Access Week http://www.openaccessweek.org/;
• Repository Support Project: http://www.rsp.ac.uk/grow/advocacy/;
• NECOBELAC project: http://www.necobelac.eu;
• SPARC: http://www.arl.org/sparc/advocacy/index.shtml;
• Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS): http://www.openoasis.org.

The EIFL-OA programme manager will be available to support your work during implementation of your projects. 



Who can apply



Libraries and organisations from EIFL partner countries http://www.eifl.net/where-we-work are eligible to participate. Applications are invited from any individual libraries and organisations or pairings or groups of libraries and organisations under EIFL partner consortia umbrella.



How to apply and deadline



1.      Please fill in the application form that can be downloaded here: http://www.eifl.net/system/files/201101/eifl-oa_application.doc. 



2.      Then, you MUST submit the application form online here: http://www.eifl.net/webform/eifl-oa-call-proposals-submission-form.



3.      In case you have technical problems, you can send your application form to iryna.kuchma[@]eifl.net



Application deadline is FEBRUARY 28th 2011.



Programme support



This programme is supported by Information programme, Open Society Foundations.



Evaluation procedure and publicity



Funding is granted on a competitive basis. Winners will be notified by approximately March 14, 2011. 



Grant recipients will be featured on the EIFL website and Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS).



Contact person

If you have any questions or need clarifications, please contact the EIFL-OA programme manager, Iryna Kuchma (iryna.kuchma[@]eifl.net).

From BOAI