Cooperation of Turkiye and Azerbaijan OpenAIRE Noads

OpenAIRE NOADs from Turkiye and Azerbaijan participated in the summer school organised in Ganja, Azerbaijan within the context of ERASMUS-EDU-2022-CBHE DIRNA project.

The status of the DIRNA project

As mentioned in our previous blog posts, the ERASMUS-EDU-2022-CBHE project "Developing Research Capacity through Institutional Repository Network in Azerbaijan" aims to establish an institutional repository network for eight Azerbaijani Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Three European higher education institutions, Izmir Institute of Technology from Turkiye, L'Aquila University from Italy and Jyväskylä University from Finland, are responsible for the training and quality control to be carried out in the project coordinated by Khazar University.

Azerbaijan Partner Institutions: Baku State University, Azerbaijan Technical University, Academy of the State Customs Committee of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Ganja State University, Nakhcivan State University, Lankaran State University, Mingachevir State University.

Azerbaijan, Ganja Summer School

Following the study tours in Izmir, L'Aquila, and Jyväskylä, a five-day summer school was organized in Ganja, Azerbaijan, hosted by Ganja State University from 29.07.2024 to 02.08.2024.

The first day of the summer school started with a special session organised for the rectors and vice-rectors of 8 Azerbaijani higher education institutions. In this session, OpenAIRE Board Member Gültekin Gürdal, one of the project partners, explained to the university administrators the importance of open science, the key role of OpenAIRE, and the work done within the project and asked them to support open science studies. Following the opening session, European higher education institutions provided three days of training to participants from Azerbaijani universities. The training covered open access and open science initiatives, policy-making, research data management, Creative Commons licenses, European Open Science Cloud applications, open publication ethics, and features of institutional repositories. During the training, OpenAIRE services that participants can use in their studies were introduced, and they were encouraged to use OpenAIRE policies as an example in their open science policy preparation processes.

On the last two days of the summer school, participants were able to deepen their knowledge of the applications. The IZTECH open science team enabled the participants to create accounts and make data entries in the trial version of an actual institutional repository so that they could better understand institutional repositories. On the last day of the meeting, all participating universities drafted an Open Science policy for their institutions based on the topics discussed in the summer school and gave presentations.

In addition to being partner universities in the project, IZTECH and AzTU also represented OpenAIRE as their countries' National Open Access Desks. IZTECH Library Director and OpenAIRE Board Member Gultekin Gurdal introduced the Azerbaijani NOADs, Khayala Hajiyeva and İltifat İbrahimov,  to the audience. The representatives from Azerbaijan informed  the participants about the planned future cooperation activities of the Turkiye and Azerbaijan NOADs to promote OpenAIRE services.