Qatar National Library ( QNL) has joined the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (Scoss), furthering its commitment to helping researchers in Qatar and beyond publish their findings on international publishing platforms.
QNL was named as a representative of the Middle East on the board of Scoss as part of its continuing commitment to sharing knowledge and information across the world through open access.
QNL will join a network of influential organisations committed to helping secure open access and open science infrastructures worldwide. These infrastructures include scholarly communication resources, services and software that help researchers collect, store, organise, access, share and assess their research.
Scoss identifies and analyses non-commercial services that are essential to open science and open access and provides recommendations for funding to entities interested in supporting these services. Since 2017, Scoss has encouraged the community to invest in nearly $3mn in open infrastructure projects. Dr Alwaleed Alkhaja, senior intellectual property librarian, will sit on the board as QNL’s representative.
Dr Alkhaja said: “Open access is all about making research publications freely available so anyone can benefit from access to research. We are committed to doing everything we can to support the researchers of Qatar, the Middle East and worldwide to disseminate their findings as far and wide as possible.
“Open access is one of our core values, which can also be seen in our commitment to offering free, unrestricted access to our collections and services such as the Qatar Digital Library. Open access is vital for improving the reach of research and helping to provide evidence for its impact. It also results in an improved reputation for researchers and their institutions, and in the long term, higher-quality research through open, transparent and reproducible research practices."
QNL takes part in various international open access initiatives, such as INTACT’s OpenAPC project and Open Access 2020, and contributes to the development of international open access principles through the International Federation of Information and Library Associations.
Since 2017, QNL has assisted researchers in Qatar by creating the Open Access Author Fund, which covers all costs related to publishing their findings on open access platforms. QNL also offers open access vouchers, allowing QNL’s partner vendors to provide vouchers for eligible authors to publish their articles in one of these vendors’ Open Access journals.
