User:Filippo Morsiani/Open access in Yemen

Researchers from Yemen publish articles in international open access journals, for example, in 2013, 16 research articles have been published with BioMed Central – an STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) publisher which has pioneered the OA publishing model – and among them are highly accessed (most viewed) articles published by researchers from Faculty of Medicine, Sana'a University,  Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Thamar University, Surgical Department Sana'a University and El-thawra Teaching Hospital, Sana'a medical School, Ibb University, and Ministry of Public health and Population.

As of June 2015, two Open Access Journals are listed in DOAJ: Arabian Humanities and Yemeni Journal of Medical Sciences. Other OA journals published in Yemen which are not listed in DOAJ include Yemen Update On-line, The British-Yemeni society Journal, Chroniques du manuscrit au Yémen and Chroniques Yéménites by Centre Français d’Archéologie et de Sciences Sociales de Sanaa, a multidisciplinary bilingual journal focusing on study of the Arabian Peninsula and Horn of Africa and has been published in French and Arabic since 1993 by the Centre français d’archéologie et de sciences sociales de Sanaa (ministère des Affaires étrangères/CNRS).

Enabling environment
Yemen’s first public exchange was installed in Aden in 1954, and the development of Yemen’s telecommunications infrastructure began after the unification in 1990. The government of Yemen recognized early on that its Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector is important to the future development of the country. The government sees ICT as a tool to support education, business processes and information flow within and across all activities, leading to increase in value added at the national level.

According to ITU, with a population of 24,133,492 in Yemen the  internet user grew from 15,000 in 2000 to 2,349,000 in 2011, that implies that it constitute 9.7% penetration rate.

Potential barriers
Poor Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure, lack of Open Access policies and awareness among the stakeholders, and lack of national Open Access policy are all potential barriers.

Projects/initiatives
Yemeni Manuscript Digitization Initiative (YMDI) is a team of research librarians and leading scholars of Arabic Literature, classical Islam and Middle Eastern history, whose mission is to preserve and present, for the first time, access to the largest and most important set of unexamined Arabic manuscripts in the world today from the private libraries of Yemen. YMDI’s partner institutions, Princeton University Library and Free University, Berlin recently received an NEH/DFG Enriching Digital Collections grant. Technicians from the Imam Zayd ibn Ali Cultural Foundation in Yemen (IZbACF) will digitize the codices of three private libraries in Yemen. These digital images will be virtually linked to Yemeni manuscripts in the Staatsbibliothek, Berlin and Princeton University Library, uploaded to the Princeton University Digital Library, and made freely available on the World Wide Web.

On February 3, 2009, the Yemen parliament discussed a bill to enhance citizen access to information. Most of it concerns public sector information and government practices, but it also touches on access to research. To ensure intellectual property rights, the draft law obliges all scientific and research institutions to put down copies of research or intellectual periodicals which they carry out or supervise.

Details of key organizations
Imam Zayd ibn Ali Cultural Foundation in Yemen (IZbACF), Current and planned projects are the digitization of 50,000 codices Arabic manuscript.