ETDs in Developing and Transition Countries: Results of eIFL.net Activities
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ETDs in Developing and Transition Countries: Results of eIFL.net Activities
Poster: In 2007 eIFL.net launched a federated repository for developing and transition countries, with the objective of providing: an infrastructure for countries; increased visibility of scholarly publications in the developing world; international co-operation and community building; a raised awareness of the importance of standards, the addition of full text within repositories; training and motivation to countries to set up repositories (encouraging competition). eIFL requested assistance from the SURF Foundation DARE project to harvest the metadata of existing institutional repositories in the members countries, and contracted the Dutch company CQ2 (used by SURF DARE and later by DRIVER) to examine the quality and quantity of existing institutional repositories. In 2007 an eIFL federated repository and a demonstrator with harvesting and statistical reports was created (http://eifl.cq2.org). eIFL.net has launched a portal for 97 institutional repositories from 17 developing and transition countries (Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Estonia, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania, Mongolia, Namibia, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, South Africa, Uganda, Ukraine and Zimbabwe) and this number is growing. It now gives every visitor free access to 141,841 full-text research findings in a consistent and harmonised way and among them there are 48,211 ETDs. With the creation of the eIFL federated repository a number of challenges showed up (like the lack of standards for proper harvesting and a lack of compliancy). eIFL also responded to requests by individual countries for conducting practical workshops on setting up Open Access institutional repositories and populating them with ETDs. Launching the federated repository helped not only to build a virtual network of institutional repositories from eIFL countries (highlighting ETDs as an important University intellectual product); it also created national and international layers of repository representation and stimulated more developments. eIFL is now moving towards linking up with the EU-funded DRIVER project. The poster highlights the development of ETDs in developing and transition countries, presents country case studies (China, Estonia, Lithuania, Russia and South Africa) and provides recommendations for future action.
2008