OpenCon 2017

The ecosystem for scholarly communication and education varies widely under diverse geographical, cultural and social contexts—and so it is perhaps no surprise the approaches towards advancing Open Research and Open Education do, as well. In this panel, we’ll take a glimpse into specific examples through which Open is being advanced around the world, with an emphasis on models that are often marginalized in mainstream discourse around Open scholarship.
Aliya will be talking about the successes and challenges of integrating openness in the Kyrgyz context through the implementation of Kyrgyz Mountains Environmental Education and Citizen Science project (KMEECS) and subsequent projects. KMEECS project applies a transdisciplinary approach to knowledge generation. It combines citizen science on the community level, environmental research and teacher training to foster awareness of and interaction with the local environment. At the same time it aims at generating locally relevant data on the environment in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan. The project pilots the introduction of low-cost environmental field courses on water monitoring in schools in mountain communities of Kyrgyzstan’s Naryn province. Based on a citizen science approach, students analyse and generate data on their water resources, which are fed into a network of open environmental data.

Zukie will cover the following: Open Science, particularly Open Data in Africa. This will be done from the perspective of the African Open Science Platform initiative. The status of Open Data in Africa will be looked through the lenses of policy, infrastructure, capacity building and incentives as per the initiatives focus areas. A list of countries actively involved in the advancement of Open Data will be highlighted as well as those that need greater intervention. Possible Marginalised models for promoting open science in Africa will also be shared with the audience. 

Danyal Hayat is an Engineer and Open Education advocate who uses National/International platforms to run awareness campaigns & contribute to the Pakistani government policies being a stakeholder & member of the working groups in different policy making processes. Danyal will be talking about Prime Minister's Youth Laptop Programme which is one of the 6 schemes of Prime Minister's Youth Program (PMYP). PM’s Youth Laptop Programme is an initiative that aims at providing 100,000 laptops per year free of cost to the university students & young researchers, with a free access to internet and to online courses at subsidised rates, which makes it the biggest milestone towards OE in Pakistan.


Guillermina's presentation will introduce the regional landscape of S&T communication, focusing on the alternatives that have been built in the last decades to increase local knowledge production’s visibility through regional indexing systems and gold open access (SciELO and RedALyC). The high-level authorities’ efforts for promoting green open access policies and building its infrastructures will also be addressed by presenting the regional initiative established in 2012, LAReferencia, which is a federated network of nine countries that aims at establishing agreements and providing guidelines for the creation of repositories to provide open access to publicly funded research, addressing S&T production as a public good