Challenges of facilitating research access in Bangladesh
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Posted on 22 May, 2017 by

– Dr M. Nazim Uddin is the Head and Senior Manager of the Library and Information Services Section at icddr,b, an international health research organization based in Dhaka. He gives a librarian’s perspective of the challenges of research access in Bangladesh

What should a library look like? For me, it should have five basic components: a building, professional staff members, resources (such as furniture and print and e-literature), budgets and users. In Bangladesh, the two most difficult components for librarians to manage are budgets and resources.
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How writing clubs help medical research communication in Sri Lanka and beyond
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Posted on 11 May, 2017 by

Dilshani Dissanayake shares her experiences of adapting INASP’s AuthorAID materials and approaches to the University of Colombo, particularly through the introduction of writing clubs that use peer learning and mentoring to boost research-writing skills. Continue reading →

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Consortium strengthens information access in Kenya
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Posted on 27 April, 2017 by

Jacinta Were, an INASP associate based in Kenya, discusses how INASP and the Kenyan library consortium have worked together for well over a decade to support sustainable access to electronic research information in the country.

I’ve known and worked with INASP for the last 15 years, mainly to support research in Africa. When INASP started working in Kenya we had gone for about six years without subscribing to any journals because there was no budget. When we did subscribe to a journal, it was just one at a time, in print form, and it would often take two years to arrive. When INASP arrived and explained what they were planning to do we welcomed them, we said “Yes, this is really the right time!” Continue reading →

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Six readings on parliaments and how they use evidence
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Posted on 18 April, 2017 by

Photo: Department of Research Services, Parliament of Uganda Author: Emily Hayter, Programme Manager, Evidence-Informed Policy Making Team, INASP Over the past 18 months, our Evidence-Informed Policy Making team has expanded our work with parliaments, digging deeper into what ‘evidence-informed policy making’ means in the complex and politically charged environments of legislatures in developing countries. We’ve been lucky to draw on our partnerships with the parliaments of Ghana, Zimbabwe and Uganda for first-hand experience from staff, but as we learn more about parliaments and how to support the research and information systems within them, we’ve also benefited from some key reports and papers. So here are some of the readings that are helping us understand the role research and evidence play in parliaments, and the ways programmes like ours can improve our approaches to strengthening evidence-informed policy making. 1. Information and Expertise for Parliaments By Global Partners Governance This is a … Continue reading →

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Miles to go for Scholarly Commons to become a global academic norm
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Posted on 12 April, 2017 by

In part one of this series, INASP Associate Ravi Murugesan reflected on the development of a Scholarly Commons and the need to consider how the guiding principles can involve, and be relevant to, researchers in the Global South. Continue reading →

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Miles to go for Scholarly Commons to become a global academic norm
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Posted on 5 April, 2017 by

This post is the first of a two-part series. In this first part, INASP Associate Ravi Murugesan describes his participation at a workshop organized by the Scholarly Commons Working Group. Part 1 of 2 There are two ways to write a report of a major event: right after attending it – while the memory of what transpired is still fresh – or sometime later, after seeing the world through a new lens inspired by that event and considering the event again in the light of what one sees. I’ve opted for the second approach to reflect on the Scholarly Commons Workshop in San Diego that I attended in September of last year. The Scholarly Commons Working Group (SCWG), which organized this workshop, is an initiative of the nonprofit organization FORCE11. According to the live draft of the Scholarly Commons principles: “…the Scholarly Commons defines a system of scholarship and research … Continue reading →

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