The Virtual Science Library Program (VSL Program) works at the national level to strengthen capacity to access, publish, and make use of peer-reviewed research, and in 2012 the Program launched in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan and expanded its work in Afghanistan, Algeria, Armenia, and Morocco.

The VSL Program initiated work in Central Asia by launching portals in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan in October 2012 with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Global Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention Program (GIPP). The portals provide easy access to all of the full-text, peer-reviewed scientific work available in each country: more than 10 million full-text articles in each country from all major academic publishers. The portals are the focal point for planned capacity-building in cooperation with our national partners: authorship and proposal writing workshops, development of national repositories, institutional internet infrastructure upgrades, and professional development in international best practices in digital library operations. More than one hundred institutions have established IP-based access to the three VSL portals in Central Asia, and access by remote login will be added in 2013.The VSL Program continued work in Afghanistan, Algeria, Armenia, and Morocco in 2012, expanding the usage and impact of international research publications in each country. Across all four countries, the VSL Program more than doubled the 2011 average monthly usage rate of the VSL portals. In Armenia, the VSL Program provided its first national trainings for hundreds of users and disseminated informational posters throughout the university and Academy of Sciences system. In Morocco and Algeria, an extensive series of workshops provided training in authorship and proposal writing to more than one thousand students and faculty. In Afghanistan, the content of the VSL Portal was increased fourfold by the addition of access to more than 10 million articles from the UN Research4Life programs at the University of Kabul and several government research institutes.

In addition to our ongoing work in 2012 on current programs, the Iraq Virtual Science Library (IVSL.org) continues to thrive after being handed off to the Government of Iraq in 2010. The IVSL was the first of CRDF Global’s VSL programs, and currently has more than 35,000 active users who downloaded more than 700,000 full-text research articles in 2012. Although our VSL portals are visible only to participating institutions due to journal license restrictions, the VSL Program also maintains VSLOpen.org, a site providing access to more than 3,000,000 Open Access articles that is available to anyone.