On November 19 2024, Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) facilitated a workshop for the Forum of Open Research in the Middle East and North Africa (FORM) community. The event was part of FORM’s How to be Open series, which aims to provide relevant and practical information to researchers, librarians, open science advocates, and other stakeholders, as well as cutting-edge knowledge and skills related to open science.
Relative to other parts of the world, the awareness and adoption of open science practices in the MENA region remain limited. For investment and adoption of open infrastructure to increase, we believe there have to be concerted efforts across regions and continents to raise awareness, build capacities, and create value-aligned networks to accelerate adoption.
The session, facilitated By IOI’s Emmy Tsang and Jerry Sellanga, was titled “How to be Open: Open Infrastructure for research & scholarship.” Through this event, we aimed to give a primer on open infrastructure and contextualize it to the MENA region in an interactive manner, as well as provide an opportunity for the audience to interact with Infra Finder, our open infrastructure discovery and evaluation tool.
As part of the session, we asked the audience what their key considerations are when selecting infrastructure to use in their work. Interoperability, cost, ease of use, and efficiency were cited as some of the key factors. This data tallies well with our findings from user engagement sessions we conducted while developing Infra Finder, highlighting the universal nature of these traits.
Video recording of the How to be Open discussion
We then introduced Infra Finder and participants had the opportunity to use the search, filter and compare functions to help find answers to questions in a few test cases. Participants expressed interest in seeing additional infrastructures listed in Infra Finder.
The audience also shared insights on some challenges and opportunities facing open infrastructure adoption in the region. Inadequate funding, lack of awareness, and lack of right-to-left translation of text were some of the challenges cited. The issue of accessibility of open science materials in Arabic is essential, and this was underscored by the recent UNESCO Recommendation, which pinpointed the critical role of multilingualism in open science. There are a number of efforts to make available and more accessible Arabic open science materials, one of which is the Open Innovation initiative by the Open Science Community of Saudi Arabia (OSCSA) supported by IOI’s Open Infrastructure Fund.
While there are challenges to open infrastructure adoption in the region, the discussion shed light on some key factors that are helping promote open infrastructure use: a growing interest in open science, the emergence of local and regional networks like FORM and ASREN that promote open infrastructure, and global policies like the UNESCO recommendation and the Barcelona Declaration to promote enhanced openness in science and research. While there is still a long way to go, IOI is committed to working with value-aligned partners in the MENA region to advance open science.