Research Information:FOCUS ON THE MIDDLE EAST


operators. The impact of two revolutions in Egypt since 2011 and the strong need for tangible results combined with a very strong political will for progress allowed the PSCE to advance and introduce the ELS initiative. The first national project developed and executed by PSCE was a ‘Presidential Leadership Program’ (PLP) to help young Egyptians between 20 and 30 years of age acquire the necessary training and skills to contribute to decision-making and governance of the country. Another project called ‘Teachers First’ seeks to deploy UNESCO’s ICT Competency Framework for Teachers (ICT- CFT) to change the behaviour of 10,000 teachers in schools. This project aims at preparing this group of school teachers for the next model of learning envisioned within the ELS initiative by mapping the


‘The EKB portal represents one of the world’s largest digital libraries’


CFT framework into in-class behaviours while coaching the teachers, in class, and assess their actual behaviour changes through an innovative assessment model recorded on their so-called ‘Learning Credit Cards’.


The heart of the ELS vision is indeed the ‘Egyptian Knowledge Bank’, which provides Open Access of the world’s highest-quality content and knowledge to every citizen in Egypt. The EKB is a ‘multilateral global partnership’ between Egypt and more than 25 global publishing houses such as Springer- Nature, Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, Wiley and Sons, Thomson Reuters, Discovery Education, National Geographic Society, Cambridge and Oxford Press, Royal Society of Chemistry, Britannica, Pearson, Dar El-Manzouma, Digital Content Associates, Emerald Insight and many others. The EKB also includes technical software such as Wolfram Mathematica and Mathworks MATLAB, with access to any IP from Egypt. The EKB partnership is an effort through which all partners join efforts to help Egypt’s transformation into one of the world’s first learning societies. The content selected for the EKB is intended for a wide variety of user profiles and age groups hoping to be both exciting and useful to kids, students, teachers, faculty, researchers and for citizens seeking life-long


www.researchinformation.info @researchinfo Emerald contributes to initiative


At an international signing ceremony held at the Egyptian presidential palace, Emerald Group Publishing signed a four-year agreement to provide Egyptian citizens with access to Emerald content via the Egyptian Knowledge Bank (EKB) project, thereby contributing to the largest digital library in the world.


The EKB will give all Egyptian citizens access to the Emerald eJournals Premier Collection, eBook series and Emerging Markets case studies collection. Egyptian citizens and researchers will also be able to access Emerald research from anywhere within the country on any form of device, including laptop and mobile. It has been designed to attract new students to academia, consequently increasing the impact of scholarly research. As well as providing


access to a wide range of well-established, high-quality research, Emerald will also be supporting the Egyptian initiative by holding a series of academic workshops to help develop the research and writing skills of Egyptian authors and researchers, ensuring the quality of the work they produce is of the highest standard. This will therefore have a positive impact on the quality and quantity of scientific research that is produced and disseminated from Egypt to a worldwide audience.


Shariq Mumtaz, managing


director, eastern hemisphere for Emerald, said: ‘This is a prestigious agreement for Emerald as a business and a positive initiative for the people of Egypt.


‘Emerald is delighted to be working closely with the Specialized Council for Education and Research to help Egypt achieve its


learning. The experimental portal for EKB was launched on 23 January 2016 in the presence of President El-Sissi, and can be reached at www.ekb.eg where any Egyptian citizen can register using her/his name and national ID if accessing the portal from any registered IP address. The final full release was scheduled for 23 January. The EKB portal represents one of the


world’s largest digital libraries hosting thousands of journal archives, hundreds of thousands of books, video and image libraries, digital curricula, databases, search engines, magazines and technical software for mathematics and science education. The portal is intended to be a resource to students in k-12 and higher education besides being an instrumental tool to help Egypt advance its efforts and improve its global rankings in scientific research and innovation. The EKB partnership entails an extensive range of related activities following the launch of the portal. Such


mission towards building a well-educated society and further developing the Egyptian Learning Community.


‘The next four years provide a great opportunity for Emerald to help the Egyptian Government achieve its long-term goals for its country in the age of science and information. ‘The positive intentions behind the EKB fall very much in line with Emerald’s desire to increase the impact of scholarly research for the benefit of society globally.’ Emerald shares the same vision as the Egyptian Government and hopes to create a well educated, innovative Egyptian community and over the next four years, will work closely with the Egyptian Government to implement various initiatives to support the academic community and promote the EKB.


activities involve k-12 curricular reform, training of teachers, training of researchers, public capacity-building programs, STEM education reform, translation efforts from/ to Arabic and the internationalization of Egyptian journals.


The few hours following the soft launch of the EKB portal witnessed an amazing visitors count that exceeded eight million citizens. The national appetite for knowledge and learning proved to be much larger than anticipated by critics of the EKB initiative. Open access to scientific literature at national scale is expected to help the country’s efforts towards advancing Egypt to higher ranks in global standings and help to develop a new generation of Egyptian children capable of global competition.


Tarek Shawki is the Secretary-General (Minister) of the Presidential Specialised Councils in Egypt. He also serves as senior strategic advisor to the president for education and outreach at The American University in Cairo.


FEBRUARY/MARCH 2016 Research Information 25


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