Country Connectors Transform R4L’s Purpose

A challenge we face at Research4Life (R4L) is how to more deeply enable access to research across lower income countries to ensure greater participation in the global research community: from access, to publishing, and knowledge exchange. R4L enables 11,000 institutions in 125 countries from Albania to Zimbabwe to have free (or close to free) access to a ‘Harvard style’ library of content, yet usage remains relatively low.

Hosted by the National Academy of Sciences last week, we heard about the impressive work of our R4L ‘Country Connectors’ - library representatives from the Republic of Tanzania, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Bhutan and Ghana. Start up funding has been provided by the Elsevier Foundation, recently joined by Springer. Led by Blessing Mawire, our team is building a community of evidence users in country, assisting with researcher and librarian training, understanding blockers to access, routes to publishing and taking action. By 2024 we will have 15 Country Connectors including the State Scientific and Technical Library of Ukraine with support from the Ministry of Education & Science.

The power of local community building is clear: to engage with lapsed institutions, to aid password to IP transition, to set up new access in smaller institutions, to run writing-up workshops, deliver subject-based research skills training. The longer term goal is to develop an ambassador network to future-proof the Connector model, working successfully in Kenya. Many of our Connectors are setting up WhatsApp groups to engage with user queries and communicate training, but equally they are building south-south collaborations — for example, Tanzania and Bhutan sharing repository set-up knowledge. Opportunities to stimulate local publishing are kicking off too with publisher workshops assessing local needs in Ghana and Tanzania.

Working in a home office environment means you can sometimes miss the deeper level of connection to your work. Meeting everyone last week was a wonderful reminder that R4L is doing work rich with meaning and purpose. We’d love more publishers to get involved beyond your generous donation of content. Contact Sarah@stm-assoc.org.

STM R4L DC July 2023