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| Issue 6 Home | Editorial | Features | Regular Columns | News & Events | Misc. | ||
By Monika Segbert, Anna Maria Balogh, Rima Kupryte and Darius Cuplinskas - February 2002
The authors outline one of the major OSI Information Programme projects, the eIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries Direct) project whose aim is to facilitate affordable access to electronic journals for libraries and their users in developing countries. Its main efforts are directed at negotiating acceptable deals with publishers while forming a multi-country consortium that will ensure sustainability.
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The CULTIVATE network fosters international co-operation. Its latest node, Cultivate Russia, demonstrates commitment to bridging the digital divide by encouraging knowledge transfer, networking and partnerships. These are the common denominators with the Soros Foundation’s Open Society Institute, which - over 10 years - has addressed the issues concerning library modernisation in countries in transition, especially in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Its Networked Library Programme helped to alleviate the effect of the momentous political and economic changes in these countries, and the impact of globalisation of the electronic information market on libraries in countries in transition.
This paper outlines one of the major OSI Information Programme projects, the eIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries Direct) project whose aim to facilitate affordable access to electronic journals for libraries and their users in developing countries. Its main efforts are directed at negotiating acceptable deals with publishers while forming a multi-country consortium that will ensure sustainability.
The paper also argues that potential but unexplored synergies exist between EC funded support actions – such as CECUP, TRIS [1] and PULMAN – and the eIFL network.
At the most fundamental, philosophical level, the concept of open society is based on the recognition that people act on imperfect knowledge and that no one is in possession of the ultimate truth. In practice, an open society is characterized by the rule of law; respect for human rights, minorities and minority opinions; the division of power; and a market economy. Broadly speaking, open society is a way to describe the positive aspects of democracy.
The term "open society" [2] was first proposed by French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and developed further by the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper (1902-1994) in his 1945 book Open Society and Its Enemies.
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| Karl Popper and George Soros discussing Open Societies |
The Open Society Institute, Budapest is a privately run, grant-making foundation that develops and implements a range of programs in civil society, culture, education, media, public health, and human and women's rights, as well as social, legal and economic reform. OSI Budapest is part of the Soros foundations network, an informal network of organizations established and supported by investor and philanthropist George Soros, and active in more than 50 countries world wide. Together with the New York-based Open Society Institute, OSI Budapest provides support and assistance to Soros foundations in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, Guatemala, Haiti, Mongolia, and Southern and West Africa.
The OSI Information Program is based on three premises. Firstly, that human beings are not passive subjects or just economic agents seeking personal gain, but civic beings who share a world which they have the power to shape. Secondly, that the ability to exchange ideas, knowledge and information is the lifeblood of citizenship and participation in a shared public sphere. And thirdly, that while traditional media remain essential to citizenship, new digital technologies hold the potential for enhancing civic life that is still largely untapped. They also entail dangers that are not yet fully understood.
Knowledge is not sufficient to create open societies. But given adequate economic resources, and a serviceable legal and institutional environment, access to knowledge in all its forms is possibly the single most important factor in determining the success or failure of open society.
Over the past five years or so, the predecessors to the Information Program have done much to provide open access to knowledge and information in previously closed societies. The Internet Program has helped to introduce internet connectivity in more than 35 countries, and has been at the forefront of funding for internet policy for human rights and independent voices online. The Network Library Program has helped libraries transform themselves into truly public, service-oriented centers for their communities. The Center for Publishing Development aided publishers in post-communist countries in the transition to market-based publishing, supported several thousand translations of core books for education and public debate, and nurtured a new electronic publishing industry in the region.
OSI wanted to support a venture that targets traditionally “information-starved” countries - access to the widest possible range of information is obviously a major factor in fostering the development of open societies. The eIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) [3] consortium provides a powerful structural solution to the ‘digital divide’ in content access. Much of the most useful online information is expensive and unaffordable to users in poorer countries. Most of the participating countries had very limited access in the past to the wealth of information available from international scholarly journals, especially in the social sciences and humanities. This was not just for political reasons but also because of the prohibitive cost to these libraries in obtaining even a small number of such journals in print format.
The project is based on leveraging two features of digital information. Firstly, the Internet network effect enables demand aggregation on a very large scale: a large consortium of individually poor consumers acquires significant negotiating power. Secondly, the marginal cost of digital data is zero, so that additional units of high-value digital commodities produced for affluent markets can be re-sold to less affluent markets at negligible cost to the producer, as long as the transaction cost to the producer is kept low.
In late 1999 OSI published a tender for access to electronic journals in social sciences and humanities, which, after independent evaluation, was won by the EBSCO Company. This initiative, called Electronic Information for Libraries Direct - eIFL Direct, makes information available electronically to libraries (academic, research, medical, public, national, and parliamentary), ministries, and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Users include scholars, policy-makers, government officials, students and the general public. To date well over 3 million searches have been performed and this number is increasing dramatically by the day. Along with Guatemala and Haiti, 27 countries are from Central and Eastern Europe (mostly former Soviet satellites), and ten are from southern Africa. The project is currently expanding to Western African countries and Indonesia, as well as to other countries that have expressed interest.
The project was conceived and initiated centrally by OSI, but it became clear very quickly, that its sustainability hinged very much on maximum involvement of the stake-holders, e.g. those libraries who were expected to fund and promote the project from national sources and to local users. A key workshop in November 2000 brought many of the representatives of the participating countries together to discuss the best way to sustain the project. The logical conclusion of keeping in mind the two principal features of leveraging digital information, was to form national consortia, who would be responsible for fund-raising, training, marketing, and provide up-to-date feedback on the needs of its users for existing and future content. However, forming and running consortia requires a sophisticated level of management and co-operation, which many countries in the OSI network had not yet been able to acquire. Much of the effort of developing the eIFL project throughout 2001 was therefore devoted to helping the creation of national consortia, through meetings, grant schemes, training and the strategic advice of Task Forces representing the regions in the eIFL network.
Levering the combined purchasing power of many led to the decision to form the world’s biggest library consortium: EIFL.Net is an international consortium of library consortia that will lead, support, motivate, and advocate for the wide availability of information by library users in member countries in transition.
It will: (1) assist in the building of strong national consortia; (2) be the premier multi-country negotiator for securing affordable commercial electronic information services; (3) strongly advocate for the development of local digital resources; (4) provide a strong central business relationship with content providers; (5) leverage multi-national expertise and resources to expand the access to information; (6) provide top quality educational and consulting services; (7) be an advocate for the adoption and advancement of effective information distribution models; and, (8) develop model partnerships with global funding agencies, foundations, consortial groups, and content providers.
Its goals are to lead, encourage and support the building of national consortial agencies within each of the member countries; to provide libraries, through their national consortia, with expanded availability of electronic content through the highly effective acquisition, use and management of information resources; to provide member consortia with educational, consulting and marketing programs and services that are highly responsive to the needs of the membership; to act on behalf of national consortia and the libraries they represent to influence and change the evolving information environment and to effect the pricing models and technological standards and practices related to the use of and access to electronic information resources.
The eIFL project now encompasses more than 40 countries with a total population of about 800 million. The larger it is, the greater its negotiating power with suppliers. Of the 200 or so countries in the world, about 150 cannot afford broad, direct access to information resources of the kind EIFL is providing, and the project could in principle expand to encompass most of these countries. Already well over 2 000 institutions now take part in the eIFL project, who collectively have performed over 4 million searches, and the number continues to grow.
Training librarians involved in the eIFL project has – to no-ones real surprise – turned out to be one of the key factors of success. Currently a training programme is being designed that will strengthen the capacity to sustain the eIFL project and to take an active part in eIFL.Net. The overall aim of the training program is to ensure that all countries of the region have a clear understanding of the issues involved in the creation and operation of a library consortium. The initial and primary aim is to assist in the establishment and operation of consortia to make effective use of the eIFL databases, while keeping in mind that longer-term consortia for other purposes should be enabled. The success of this program will be measured by the extent to which the appropriate people in the relevant countries gain understanding and skills necessary for effective consortium operation.
In its initial iteration, the eIFL project is a West-to-South/East conduit for journals and databases in the social sciences, public policy, business and medicine. EBSCO, the provider chosen as a result of an international tender, through its databases offers access to more than 5000 journals in these subjects. This content base is now expanding to include science and technology journals, and richer resources for medicine and public health. OSI, in partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO) is already conducting a pilot called the Research Network Pilot in 9 sites in 8 countries. Five countries are in Africa and 3 in the eIFL consortium include Mongolia, Uzbekistan and Armenia. The information partners in the pilot include SilverPlatter, ISI and Elsevier. The goal is to rollout the project after the pilot has been evaluated to approximately 170 developing countries of the world.
A second function of the consortium will be to act as a conduit for lateral information exchange, facilitating East-East, South-South and South-East content flows. It will also be a platform for developing local digital content which feeds into the consortium. Third, the consortium could become a bulk buyer of low-cost hardware and software applications for its member institutions, and an infrastructure for delivering training. At a later stage, it could begin to function as a network for dissemination of policy knowledge and participation in national and global information policy formation.
OSI is also involved in strengthening the role of alternative publishers of electronic journals, such a, to name but one, the Public Library of Science. A recent meeting in Budapest brought the main players of high-quality but low-cost initiatives together to discuss how to bring about barrier-free access to scholarly publications.
Since the fall of the Berlin wall, the EC has taken many steps to encourage co-operation with the countries of Central and Eastern Europe – mostly with the so-called New Accession Countries, but also with the Russian Federation, and countries of the former Soviet Union. This engagement is acknowledged by George Soros, who is in the process of reducing his commitment to Central Europe, in favour of other countries in Africa and Asia which do not receive as much attention from Europe.
There are many projects supported by the European Union that can and could use the network created through the eIFL network to transfer knowledge and research results, enable closer networking with institutions in the EU, and aid capacity building pioneered in the 10 years of OSI operations in the region. Extending the CULTIVATE network eastwards to Russia in one such example, as is the PULMAN network for public libraries which includes countries in Eastern and Southern Europe. A recent OSI initiative as part of eIFL is to run a series of workshops on electronic licensing in the eIFL countries, following the model created in the EU CELIP project, and run by the then CELIP project manager. A new EC funded action, TRIS (see article in this issue of Cultivate Interactive) plans to actively foster the participation of relevant interest groups that may not otherwise be present in IST. This relates in particular to the participation of non-EU countries, mostly within the PHARE, TACIS and MEDA areas. Despite the availability of significant resources and the active promotion policies undertaken by the Commission, in fact, these areas have experienced difficulties in their involvement in European RTD activities. It is one of the working hypothesis of TRIS that the TRIALS format, because of its lightweight footprint and of its direct concern with results and technology transfer, may represent an optimal vehicle for the involvement of these countries and potentially a bridgehead for a low-risk inclusion of these areas into the 6th FP. And then, when we look ahead, we see other EC projects which will have increasing relevance for the development of Open Societies in the OSI countries, such as PSINet [4] a wide-ranging preparatory action under the European Commission's e-Content programme. It has been following up the 1999 Green Paper on Public Sector Information and supporting the overall aim to improve access to Europe's Public Sector Information (PSI).
Much has been done by OSI, especially through its networked library programme, and now within the activities of eIFL, to level the playing field for libraries and their users in disadvantaged communities around the world. Much remains to be done – lets do it all together.
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Monika Segbert MBE FLA (hon)
Project management and consultancy
info@monikasegbert.com
<http://www.monikasegbert.com/>
Anna Maria Balogh
eIFL Project Coordinator
abalogh@osi.hu
<http://www.eifl.net/>
Rima Kupryte
Manager, OSI Networked Library Programme
Darius Cuplinskas
Director, OSI Information Programme
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For citation purposes:
Segbert, M., Balogh, A., Kupryte, R. and Cuplinskas, D. "eIFL - Electronic Information for Libraries", Cultivate Interactive, issue
6, 11 February 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue6/eifl/>
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