Eldis 20th Anniversary Workshop 2016: Alan Stanley

Editor's Notes

• #2 My name is Alan Stanley, I work in the Open Knowledge and Digital Services team at IDS and among other things I work on Eldis which this year is celebrating our 20th Anniversary In truth Eldis is a little older than 20 years. In fact you could argue the first version of Eldis was this publication produced by BLDS in 1994. And discussed at the IMWG that year? A quick show of hands if you were at that meeting?   I’m not going to dwell too much on the history but if you’re interested you can find a timeline charting some of the more significant developments in the about section of the website. http://www.eldis.org/go/about-eldis/eldis-20th-anniversary   But we’ve chosen this year to celebrate the anniversary as it marks 20 years since we received our first funding for the project from DANIDA.   It also seemed like a good moment to take the opportunity to pause and reflect on:   what we’ve learned over the 20 years we’ve been going what the current landscape looks like for knowledge services like Eldis where the opportunities and challenges lie and what that means for the future   It’s good time given the way the whole framing of global development is shifting at the moment (more on that from Melissa shortly)   It’s a good time to think about where we can make a difference and how we can construct new business models that allow us to be sustainable.   That’s why we’re here.
• #3 So what is Eldis?   In line with the IDS strategy our aim is to enhance the contribution of research evidence to addressing poverty and inequality by helping to improve the sharing and effective use of research knowledge by development actors   In simple terms we make research documents visible, available and accessible online. Free at the point of use Presenting a diversity of perspectives Categorised around key themes or countries (breaking down silos)   If you go to the Eldis website – that’s what you will find.
• #4 Over the years we’ve developed a set of core values and approaches that underpin what we do:   Openness – Eldis is a long term advocate for Open Access publishing and the notion that knowledge is a global public good that should be available to all – free at the point of use    Equity – Perhaps most fundamentally we see Eldis as being about supporting equity. Equity of access among global research users (demand) and particularly supporting smaller, southern research producers to increase the visibility and accessibility of the knowledge they have generated so that it is able to reach the same audiences as their richer, larger, northern counterparts   Relevance – sharing diverse, timely, evidence-based development information in accessible formats appropriate to the specific context of the target user groups (either directly or, more often, though other intermediaries) in order to have the maximum impact   Innovation – the thoughtful use of emerging technologies to create innovative products and services that support these other values   Collaboration – we try to work in ways which support others working in our sector. That means both research producers and also intermediaries or knowledge brokers who work to share knowledge and increase the use of evidence in development policy-making and practice
• #5 So what have we learned.  Well there’s so much to say but I thought it might be worth reflecting briefly on what we’ve learned relating to these 5 areas and whether they still stand or whether we need to look towards a new set of values and approaches.   Openness  Well much of this is very positive. Open Access publishing methods have been widely adopted and most research funders now require that research be made freely available in some form of Open Access.   Our survey shows not just widespread support for Open Access now but also widespread adoption. Of the orgs we surveyed only 8% never use Open Access journals (for 38% it is their usual practice) to share research compared to over 20% that now never use pay-walled journals (for nearly 70% it is their usual practice) Over 85% deposit in repositories with this being usual practice for nearly 70% So much of what Eldis set out to do at the start to support making research openly and freely available is now being done routinely and systematically elsewhere. So that’s allowed us to shift our focus more towards making research more discoverable and visible in online spaces. Using the audiences and infrastructure we’ve developed over the years to make that knowledge travel further across sectoral and geographic boundaries – augmenting and structuring, adding metadata and keywords. Recognising that the information seeking behaviour of users has changed and continues to change as we interact with emerging digital technologies and trends.    Equity  But when it comes to equity there is also evidence from our work that Open Access hasn’t fully addressed inequalities in access or visibility of research from developing countries perhaps in the way that we hoped it would – and in some cases is causing new problems for researchers and research users because of the way it has been rolled out (we’ll hear more from Nason and Williams on this later).
• #6 And the same can be said about technology and innovation. Many of the technological advances of the last few years show enormous potential to improve the creation, discoverability, accessibility, visibility and share-ability of knowledge:   semantic web technologies, content mining, the development and adoption of unique identifiers like DOIs and ORCID.   To name a few. But the adoption of these technologies and standards is uneven and tends to be concentrated around the larger, better resourced, usually European or US development organisations – and they’re the ones reaping the benefits. The reasons for this are complex – lack of resourcing, technical capacity seem to be obvious factors but it goes a bit beyond that I think and we need to understand about why smaller organisations, often in developing countries, are making slower progress. Is it about lack of leadership or maybe a question of scale.   We need to understand this better not least to ensure that we’re not inadvertently contributing to the problem and in fact widening some of these digital divides. And we now use this phrase the “thoughtful use of technology” to remind ourselves of this.
• #7 One of the clearest lessons from Eldis in recent years has been that even on a global platform like ours there is strong demand for local knowledge. Example from SPARC Nigeria The key thing we learned about being relevant was that it was virtually impossible to do on our own. Trying to cover the breadth of development discourse and to understand the particular needs of audiences in different geographical, political and cultural contexts was – unsurprisingly when you think about it – quite hard to do from Sussex.   Ultimately relevance is about satisfying demand and we discovered that we needed partners who understood those contexts and could access those audiences in order to effectively meet demand – and have an impact as a result.   So on the innovation and technology level that led us back to openness – we moved away from a focus on simply creating content for our websites towards creating content that was sharable, openly licensed, and could be repacked and re-used by those partners who could tailor more accurately to their audiences.   And it also led us towards this more collaborative model of working.   Since we began Eldis has worked with over 100 partner organisations – intermediaries, research organisations, NGOs, networks and it is the quality of these relationships that ultimately determines the quality of our work and the impact we have – not the number of visitors to our website or the number of downloads of documents.   I know that we’ve helped a lot of those organisations to be more effective in their work and I know that we’ve learned a huge amount from them that has made us more effective.   But I think we made a mistake here too in that we’ve continued to try to demonstrate value in what we do by talking about downloads, and numbers of user sessions and should have done more to really try and measure and demonstrate the value in these relationships.  
• #8 So where do we go from here? Do we need a new set of values and approaches?   Well we have been giving it some thought and we’ve got some ideas but we don’t have all the answers – in fact we probably have more questions but hey we’re a research organisation so what do you expect?   I think our values still hold? There are clearly still inequalities that must be addressed and I think that is implicit in the framing of the SDGs. So there’s an opportunity there but we need to make it explicit – to clearly define the gaps and barriers that exist and how they can be addressed. I hope we can make some progress with that over these two days.   One thing we do need to do to make this happen, and I’m speaking for Eldis here, because I think many of you have recognised and started to act on this already, is to think of knowledge sharing as being something that is much more a part of and embedded in the process of knowledge creation. – not separating research from research communication, moving beyond open access to talking about Open Research (as Eve Gray does).