The Open Access (OA) initiative has further strengthened in Azerbaijan through embarking digital projects funded by international entities. With the support of Open Access organizations, Azerbaijani Library and Information Consortium (AZLIC), and partners like EIFL – an international not-for-profit organization based in Europe with a global network of partners, academic and research libraries in Azerbaijan have started to show interest in having their own institutional repositories. As of January 2022, there are in Azerbaijan 3 OAIRs indexed in the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) and in Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR).
While some strong interest in conceptualizing the OA policy has already been expressed by different internal stakeholders, but it is still left up to individual institutions to decide on the OA’s actual implementations. There is an evident lack of understanding of OA-related general procedures and ethical principles among researchers and students. Several institutions in Azerbaijan have OA institutional repositories but OA publishing is less common. Therefore, the best way for raising the awareness of the benefits of OA is to disseminate the ‘message’ through a national OA advocacy campaign.
Consequently, Azerbaijan has continued relying on research, which, to a larger extent, may not necessarily be conceptually relevant to the problems that the country-bound region is facing. In a significant addition, despite a high number of academic and semi-academic journals being published in Azerbaijan these days, most of them are hardly accessible outside the institutions where they are published, leading to duplication of research and poor visibility of articles on the international stage. The limited circulation of scholarly publications in the country has ‘crafted’ a framework for an internal debate on finding a proper way of fashioning out a working method of disseminating scholarly research in developing countries (in general) and Azerbaijan (in particular). The idea is to balance the global information equation up and improve the visibility and impact of Azerbaijan research outputs. Therefore, providing access to volumes of national research has become a priority in recent years. Arguably, this is indispensable if one wants to raise the profile of research conducted in and by the Azerbaijani HEIs and integrate it into the international knowledge pool.
The previous experience of Khazar University of taking part in many joint projects, including PETRA under the auspices of ERASMUS+, will serve as a base for further activities in the context of policy-shaping. Khazar will play the role of a bridge between the EU-based and Azerbaijani Universities. Firstly, in Azerbaijan, Khazar University already built Institutional Repository (IR), and this initiative was to create a model for the development of archival and dissemination tools for delivering scholarly materials to students and academicians in Khazar University via the Internet The experience Khazar gained in the process of implementing its own IR allowed its team of IT specialists and librarians to promote the idea of institutional repository network and act as a regional leader to develop this process and assist other universities around the country. The 2022 QS Emerging Europe & Central Asia University Rankings confirmed Khazar University’s 9th place in the region in the ‘Citations per Paper’ segment, indicating its world-class capacity in conducting and disseminating internationally recognized research.
Azerbaijani universities and their libraries should make every effort possible to move forward with an Institutional Repository. The University libraries will take a leading role in this initiative Our core values speak to the preservation and access needs of our scholars. These values have been with us since the Khazar University Library’s inception, and we have demonstrated an ongoing commitment to them throughout our transition into digital production and delivery. Developments in digital technologies have affected many aspects of the academic enterprise, especially the way scholarly communication is being carried out. An IR supports the dissemination of knowledge by curating locally produced digital materials and creating institutionally unique digital collections of Azerbaijani Universities to support teaching and learning.
The establishment of DIRNA will assist the Azerbaijani universities to consolidate its research activities in line with the current National Strategy for Higher Education. Support from CBHE action is requires due two of the strands of the ERSMUS+ Programme are digitalization and fostering access to capacity building opportunities and improving social inclusion and the access of students/staff with fewer opportunities to a qualitative higher education offer. Khazar’s policy in the case of the disabled students is that we must go “beyond the on-campus/online dichotomy” to give them equal learning opportunities.
According to his objective we would like to propose an Institutional Repository network project to help us seed the repository with different types of materials, from different groups of users, including disability persons, identify technical, administrative, and cultural issues that may arise, and demonstrate the viability of such a model for managing the intellectual output and digital assets of Azerbaijani universities.