Iryna Kuchma, Libraries advocating for open access in Ukraine, eIFL.net, May 2009. A report from an international conference in Sevastopol, Ukraine, May 21, 2009. Let me separate four bits of news so that none gets lost:
(1) Ukraine is starting to implement the national OA mandate it adopted in 2007 but until now had not implemented:
To implement the Open Access Mandate (open access to research funded from the state budget of Ukraine introduced in the Law of Ukraine On the principles of Developing Information Society in Ukraine in 2007-2015) the Vernadsky National library of Ukraine created a registry of 726 journals and full text articles of 346 journals (starting from 2008) are already deposited here. 2453 full text records are also deposited in the DSpace repository of the Vernadsky National library of Ukraine.
This initiative was presented at the seminar E-libraries Management and Technologies on May 20,2009 at the National parliamentary library of Ukraine (in the frames of the Sixth international conference Documents, Libraries and Information: Problems and practices of science and education, May 19-21, 2009, State academy for the arts and culture management).
(2) Ukrainian librarians issued a progressive statement endorsing OA:
More than 150 Ukrainian University librarians endorsed Open access to knowledge statement on May 21, 2009 at the International conference Libraries of the higher education institutions in the context of higher education modernisation that took place in Sevastopol, Ukraine:
"We support open access to knowledge and strategies on developing open institutional repositories and open access journals published by the Universities....
We ask the government to support open access to research information especially when the research is funded from the state budget of Ukraine, as well as to support open access to research data and cultural heritage.
We ask the researchers to support open access and self-archive research papers, reports, dissertations, educational materials, etc., in open institutional repositories and publish articles in open access journals. We ask the researchers to retain copyright.
We ask the Universities and research institutions to implement open access policies and strategies, provide open access to the full-text peer-reviews research outputs produced by the faculty and staff....We ask to launch and develop open institutional repositories and open access journals...
We ask the academic journal publishers … to allow self-archiving of the postprints, request only the rights needed to publish an article, cancel or shorten the embargo periods and provide the published versions of the articles to the relevant open institutional repositories.
We ask the university libraries to promote open access to research information among the research community, faculty and individual researchers. To launch and develop open institutional repositories to provide open access to the research materials and to raise the University profile, provide long-term preservation for the research publications. Repositories should follow DRIVER and other relevant recommendations, be OAI-PNH compliant and interoperable to allow the best possible global searching facilities.”
Full text of the Open access to knowledge statement in Ukrainian is here. [PS: Also see the statement in Google's English.]
Congratulations to Tetiana Yaroshenko, University Librarian, Vice President for IT, National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy, and eIFL-OA country coordinator in Ukraine, for introducing this declaration. Her presentation (from the above mentioned conference) Open Access: History and current projects in Ukraine and in the world (in Ukrainian) is here.
(3) A Ukrainian research institute launched a new disciplinary repository:
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
