Electronic Information For Libraries (EIFL), in 2011 provided financial support to 13 projects that initiated open access advocacy campaigns at national and institutional level to reach out to research communities and also stimulate open access publishing initiatives. These projects, drawn from African and Eastern European countries, 11 projects focused on OA advocacy and 2 projects focused on improving OA publishing systems and models. National OA advocacy Campaigns were drawn from Botswana, Estonia, Ghana, Lithuania, Poland, Slovenia and Ukraine, while institutional advocacy campaigns were drawn from Latvia, Malawi, Sudan, Zimbabwe.

The adoption of open access model by research institutions, universities and journal publishers was naturally thought would improve availability of scientific output than the traditional publishing model. Many institutions set up repositories but awoke to the sad reality that researchers were not depositing their works, that organizational frameworks were not support the OA model and that a lot of lobbying was needed to get researchers comfortable with it. In light of these challenges, EIFL’s call provided institutions with funds to advocate for local support in open access.

In these case studies a variety of strategies were adopted on a case-by-case, however in general the aim was to i) educate researchers on the benefits of OA and demystify misconceptions, ii) provide local publishing journals and also local and international OA Journals iii) create promotional materials iv) mobilize institutions to adopt OA policies to help institutions adopt open access frameworks v) identify local champion persons, or advocates of open access vi) to document open access success stories.

In Botswana, for example, the local library consortia coordinated activities that saw the University of Botswana assisting the Department of Agricultural Research at the Ministry of Agriculture to start an open access repository, and also helped the Botswana College of Agriculture to develop a draft institutional policy document. While 11 journals published by the University of Botswana are being helped to adopt open journal systems and become open access.

Two projects in Lithuania and Serbia focused on open access publishing ,with the earlier one it aimed at improving the visibility  and interoperability of open access journals through implementing the open journal systems (OJS). OJS provides platform that support every stage of the refereed publishing process, through to online publication and indexing. In Serbia, the project managed to help Serbian Journal publishers to switch to article processing charges OA model, where software and capacity building activities were initiated.5 journals titles were reported to have migrated to the new model and 21 have since showed a keen interest. A deep insight to these case studies reveals good experiences and models that can be used in OA advocacy and also in adoption of Open Journal Systems. For more information visit http://www.eifl.net/eifl-oa-case-studies