EIFL

Background: EIFL began in 1999 (originally known as eIFL.net) as an initiative of the Open Society Institutes, which is now the Open Society Foundations, a private grantmaking foundation in the Soros Network Foundation.

Mission: EIFL is committed to expanding access to knowledge in developing and transition economy countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. Its Open Access Programme works in collaboration with libraries and library consortia in more than 60 countries to advocate for open access to research results, open science policies and infrastructures.

Community over Commercialization:

“For us, it’s important to really unpack the concept of community, especially if something is run by research institutions. You can imagine how researchers participate. But if we think about local communities and citizen science, they have no way to participate unless the infrastructure is designed to include them. It’s important for academia to partner with communities and for them to contribute. It’s not a global conversation, it’s a local conversation.”

“We’ve always worked with public institutions and supported local open access and open science initiatives. For us, it’s the natural way to emphasize that the research community should maintain ownership and control of their publishing, scholarly communication and open science infrastructure—and community governance is important.”

“We are the voice of communities in our partner countries in Africa, Asia, and Europe. All partners are national library consortia, and they have a mandate in their countries to act in the interests of research communities. We represent the interests of research communities, and also in some cases, rural communities.”

“Communities may also be indigenous communities. In some countries, in Botswana, for example, we wrote a National Open Science Policy. Every activity you do in a country should be aligned with the interests of those communities. The design and scholarly communication system infrastructure should work for universities, research institutes, and for indigenous communities with traditional knowledge holders.”

-Iryna Kuchma, manager, EIFL Open Access Programme