“The Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME) offers free and open access to the rich cultural legacy of the Middle East and North Africa by bringing together collections from a wide range of cultural heritage institutions. Developed by an engineering team from CLIR and Stanford Libraries, the platform federates and makes accessible data about collections from around the world….”
Category Archives: oa.mena
Statement on Collection Development, Access, and Equity in the time of COVID-19
“As is the case in Latin America and the Caribbean and elsewhere across the Global South, the majority of publications from the Middle East (Southwest Asia), North Africa and the diasporas are print-only, and are not available in electronic formats. Therefore, collecting policies which prefer electronic acquisitions at the expense of print risk excluding from their growing collections a significant portion of the cultural and scholarly production of these regions. Such policies threaten the diversity of representation in library collections by further marginalizing already marginalized voices….
We are particularly concerned that research materials and resources will be concentrated in a handful of wealthy, often private, institutions. Commitment to area studies in general and to Middle East studies librarianship in particular is also instrumental for maintaining diverse and inclusive collections that reflect and support the wide ranging scholarly and creative interests of our users.”
OA in an OAsis Revisited – YouTube
OpenMed – Opening up Education in South-Mediterranean countries
“Five partners from Europe and nine from South Mediterranean Countries are working together to widening participation and adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Educational Practices (OEP) as a bottom-up approach to support the modernisation of the Higher Education sector in Morocco, Palestine, Egypt and Jordan….”
Journal publishers and platforms outside USA, Europe and Australia
QU Library collaborates with Elsevier
“Qatar University Library (QUL) and Elsevier, a leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, have established a collaboration to maximise visibility, impact and dissemination of articles published by QU faculty and researchers.
Through Elsevier’s ScienceDirect APIs, QUL’s institutional repository now receives an automated feed of metadata and abstracts for all articles published by QU authors in Elsevier journals. Embargo-end dates indicating when an article can be made available to the public are also provided to facilitate funding body compliance.
Published versions of the ScienceDirect articles are embedded within QSpace, which means that usage is added to aggregated usage statistics of the articles, which is helpful for authors, QU and Elsevier. It would not be possible to aggregate this usage if different versions of the article existed across multiple platforms.
The embedded ScienceDirect articles are available in full text to all users of QSpace that have access to ScienceDirect, not only those affiliated with QU. Users affiliated with institutions subscribing to ScienceDirect are linked to the full text based on IP recognition by the APIs. In instances where users are not affiliated with a subscribing institution, they see a first page preview of the article and full text articles can be accessed via document delivery services. The automated population of the repository is applicable for both open access and subscription articles.
In addition, QSpace is the first institutional repository to use DSpace plug-ins, which facilitate easy integration of ScienceDirect APIs within a repository….”
Directory of Free Arab Journals
From the LibLicense announcement by ElHassan: “I am writing to you to announce the release of the second version of the Directory of Free Arab Journals . It is an independent initiative to produce a directory for all OA journals produced in Arab countries, curated and funded by a group of OA activists in the region (myself included). The website was there since 2013 the new version released last week includes over twice as many journals and many new website features. It currently lists 250 journals from 172 publishers in 17 Arab countries. The guide is published under a CC-BY-NC license….”
Dubai declaration or recommendations on open education
“Last year about this time, news stories set us up to expect the imminent release of the Dubai Declaration on Open Access to Learning….I’ve been searching ever since and haven’t found the declaration.
Subsequent news stories suggested that the title changed to Dubai Recommendations on Open Access to Learning….But I can’t find the recommendations either.
Does anyone have a URL for the declaration or recommendations? Or does anyone know why they might not yet have been released?”