Open access in Armenia

EIFL projects raise awareness about open access and lead to development of open access journals and repositories in Armenia

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Submitted by Iryna_K on Tue, 2022-10-11 18:18
EIFL facilitated two open science workshops organized by the Minerva Project at Yerevan ‘Brusov’ State University of Languages and Social Sciences in September 2019.

OVERVIEW

Our work in Armenia intensified in 2019 through our involvement in two EU-funded projects. EIFL is an Advisory Board member and Associate partner in the Erasmus+ MINERVA project, ‘Strengthening Research Management and Open Science Capacities of HEIs in Moldova and Armenia’, and we are contributing to the development of open science policies and repositories in Armenia through the ‘National Initiatives for Open Science in Europe’ (NI4OS Europe) project.

Open access (OA) has been growing in Armenia since 2007 when the National Academy of Sciences launched two high-quality open access journals, the Armenian Journal of Mathematics and the Armenian Journal of Physics.

EIFL began supporting open access in Armenia in 2008. Working with the Fundamental Scientific Library of the National Academy of Sciences and our partner library consortium, the Electronic Library Consortium of Armenia (ELCA - now known as the Digital Library Association of Armenia), we organized a workshop on open access for academics, researchers and librarians from across the country. The workshop resulted in the publication of more open access journals.

Although there was support for open access at the National Academy of Sciences, Armenia's university community, especially outside the capital city, Yerevan, lagged behind. To address these issues, ELCA implemented two EIFL-funded projects that engaged members of the academic community from across Armenia. The projects raised awareness about open access and resulted in creation of a national open access repository for electronic theses and dissertations in Armenia. In 2022/23, we contributed to improving this repository by supporting installation of DSpace software and moving the content to a more user-friendly platform. 

TIMELINE

2008 - 2023

MAIN ACTIVITIES

  • Advancing national and institutional open access and open science guidelines, policies and incentives.
  • Setting up a national repository for theses and dissertations. 
  • Setting up open access digital repositories at universities. 
  • Building capacity to journal editors in open access publishing. 
  • Training and awareness raising.

ACHIEVEMENTS

Increased number of open access policies

 Four universities adopted institutional policies: Open Access Policy, Regulation of Repository and Open Science Strategy: 

  • Armenian State University of Economics
  • Brusov State University 
  • Yerevan State Medical University 
  • Yerevan State University

Increased availability and visibility of Armenian research output

  • Open Access repositories
  • Open Access journals
    • Major Armenian scholarly journals converted to open access.   
    • Raised awareness about Creative Commons licences: Armenian open access journals are published under Creative Commons Attribution licence. 

Built open access and open science capacity

  • Built open access capacity and raised awareness of academics, researchers, students, journal editors, publishers and librarians at research centres and universities in five regions of Armenia: Yerevan, Lori, Shirak, Tavush and Syuniq.
  • Trained 20 open science trainers.
  • Developed information materials about open access.
Open Access Programme
Armenia