EIFL has been supporting national and institutional open access awareness raising and advocacy in Georgia in collaboration with our national partner, the Georgian Integrated Library Information System Consortium (GILISC) 2017, since 2008.
GILISC manages open access infrastructure to raise visibility of Georgian research and science, in partnership with ‘Ivane Javakhishvili’ Tbilisi State University (TSU) National Science Library of Georgia. This infrastructure includes openscience.ge, a digital repository of academic works by Georgian scientists, openlibrary.ge, a digital repository of non-scientific works, and openjournals.ge, a multidisciplinary publishing platform for Georgian academic journals. Openjournals.ge is the largest publishing platform for open access journals in Georgia, with participation by 37 universities and research institutes.
In 2021/22, EIFL supported a GILISC project to increase visibility of Georgian research output by improving existing academic journals and bringing them online, using the openjournals.ge platform. The project involved building open access publishing capacity at GILISC member institutions, raising awareness about international standards for open access journals and encouraging compliance with these standards, registering journals with the international Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and redesigning the openjournals.ge platform.
Timeline
2008 - 2022
Activities
- Institutional and national open access awareness raising and advocacy events.
- Building repository management and open access publishing capacity.
- Increasing awareness about international journal publishing standards and best practices.
- Improving academic journals to meet international standards and best practices.
- Registering journals with DOAJ.
- Redesigning the publishing platform, openjournals.ge.
- Advice in setting up open infrastructure for Georgian research.
Achievements
Raised visibility and accessibility of Georgian research
- 30 journals from 20 institutions added to openjournals.ge, bringing the total number of journals available in open access on the platform to 53.
- The open.journal.ge platform, which is based on OJS, has been redesigned to meet the needs of publishers, editors, writers and readers, with -
- Customizable journal pages for GILISC member institutions;
- An enhanced user interface, including an improved navigation menu;
- Useful resources in Georgian and English for journal publishers, editorial teams on international standards and indexing;
- Tools for researchers and authors.
Improved journal publishing capacity at academic institutions
- Organized seven workshops for journal editors and managers, covering journal indexing in DOAJ, Worldcat, Ulrichsweb, Web of Science, Scopus, Erih Plus and OJS management and technical training, and tools for researchers.
- Increased journal managers’ and editors’ understanding of DOAJ criteria and registration procedures.
Setting up open access infrastructure
- A digital repository of academic works by Georgian scientists - openscience.ge
- A digital repository of non-scientific works by Georgian scholars - openlibrary.ge
- Improved publishing platform for open access journals in Georgia - openjournals.ge
