The Global Access Program (GAP) is DataCite’s initiative to improve access and enable communities in lesser-represented regions to further benefit from our open infrastructure services, launched with support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (Grant 2022-316573). Throughout the next year, the program builds out DataCite’s international community with regional support and engagement in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Through focused regional engagement in these regions, DataCite will better support equitable access to our infrastructure services, ensuring that researchers and research organizations globally have the opportunity to benefit from persistent identifiers and metadata.
Do you know that Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) can be assigned to all research outputs? A DOI, which is a type of Persistent Identifier (PID), could be assigned and used for various research outputs such as datasets, research software, dissertations, grants, peer review reports, and the list goes on. The end goal is to capture all these interactions within the research ecosystem in what we call a PID Graph.
I am Mohamad Mostafa, DataCite’s Regional Engagement Specialist for the Middle East & Asia. Within this new role, I am going to listen to the community and work directly with them to build more openness and trust in scholarly infrastructure. I am preparing different engagement and community development activities such as webinars, workshops, and creating educational content in both English & Arabic. Also, we are looking into launching a DataCite Ambassadors Program to expand our engagement activities with the local communities. I am passionate about Open Science and promoting the importance of implementing PIDs in research workflows. I participated in launching the ORCID Arabic interface to the Arab world and promoted ORCID’s value and impact. Having served as a volunteer Crossref Ambassador for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, I worked closely with regional institutions, publishers, university presses, and other stakeholders to raise awareness about the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure. Also, I am interested in information ethics, promoting transparency, and the best practices in scholarly publishing. In light of this and during my time at Knowledge E in 2017, I conceived a new initiative named ‘Think. Check. Attend.’ to help scholars choose the right conferences to attend/present their research and to avoid misleading events.
At DataCite we recently launched the Global Access Program (GAP) to improve access and help regional communities to further benefit from our open infrastructure services and unlock any knowledge barriers. As I have been working with regional institutions across the Middle East & Asia, I do understand their challenges in implementing various types of PIDs. I look forward to engaging with librarians, researchers, repository managers, information specialists, learned societies, think tanks, as well as policymakers and various stakeholders in the region to foster the adoption of PIDs in general and DataCite DOIs in particular and to accelerate our emerging regions transition towards a more Open Research landscape!
