Increasing the availability and accessibility of global development research is the core business of Eldis. In recent years we’ve seen the growing ‘Open Data’ movement and accelerating use of open systems for sharing and contextualisation of development knowledge and in 2011 we opened up access to our own content through our Open API. We believe these developments hold great potential for improving decision making and contributing to broad development goals. However the use of these systems also risks widening, rather than diminishing, digital divides in the availability, accessibility and visibility of research evidence – particularly where that evidence is being generated by stakeholders in developing countries. These stakeholders risk being disadvantaged by a lack of resources and technical capacity to engage with these emerging open systems.

Through an open call for partners which ran through September and October we have identified a group of like-minded organisations, each bringing a huge amount of relevant experience in delivering knowledge services, to try to collectively tackle this issue. In the first instance we plan to work together in the development of shared open data systems and standards to promote effective content sharing and increase the visibility and reach of development research through our services. In the longer term we also aim to share learning, and collaborate on the delivery of our services in areas such as quality assurance, promotion, monitoring and evaluation and technical development.

The new partners are:

• International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie)
• Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC)
• Practical Action Latin America Regional Office (PAC LA)
• GDNet
• Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR)
• Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) – SocioEconomic Research Portal for the Philippines (SERP-P)
• Soul Beat Africa
• Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP)

The partners will come together in January 2014 for a workshop to plan the collaborative development of the project and next steps.

We hope to issue additional calls and to invite new partners to join us in 2014.

If you would like to know more about the project please get in touch with us at Eldis.

The project is supported by UKAid and draws on resources from across IDS Knowledge Services and the British Library for Development Studies.

To tell the story of the partner call process we’ve created this short infographic [view the full version here...]