Global Access Fund

The Global Access Fund (GAF) was established to enable organizations worldwide to make their research outputs discoverable. It will provide financial support for outreach activities and infrastructure development to enable organizations in underrepresented regions to benefit from DataCite infrastructure services. The GAF is part of the DataCite Global Access Program (GAP) made possible by grant Grant 2022-316573 from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Scope (What we fund):

The Global Access Fund will allocate funding to projects in the following areas:

(1) Outreach and engagement activities to support increasing awareness and adoption of global and local solutions and connect to community initiatives, such as:

Capacity building to deliver training to research administrators and librarians on open infrastructure and service fundamentals (DOIs, metadata, APIs), implementation (e.g. DataCite API integration in a repository and other systems, metadata curation) and demonstrating the value of the connection to local infrastructure services to the community.
Events (Webinars, workshops, virtual communication campaigns) to promote open infrastructure, discuss and amplify membership and adoption strategies and plans leveraging local initiatives.
Outreach resource development to deliver content (videos, social media content, podcast, tutorials, etc.) that document use cases, success stories, and benefits of DataCite infrastructure in local/regional contexts. Preference would be given to innovative formats and materials in languages other than English.

Repository, publishing, and other system development and implementation to allow organizations to integrate DataCite APIs and metadata
DataCite API integrations to connect local and national systems with the DataCite Registry
Development of new tools and systems to obtain additional value from our infrastructure (e.g. visualizations, statistics tools, metadata enrichment tools, CRIS systems, etc.) .

(3) Demonstrators

As part of the program and with funding from the Global Access Fund, we'll seek to identify and incubate three demonstrators across the regions. The three demonstrators can be in the following areas.

Leveraging and implementing open international infrastructure services for the benefit of local communities. Awarded projects should create opportunities for the local communities to take advantage of DataCite infrastructure to boost visibility of their research outputs and resources.
Leveraging and/or establishing open local infrastructure services and communities. Under this theme, we would like to enable local organizations to connect existing local solutions to global solutions to facilitate the use by communities that currently do not have access to these solutions. This way, organizations and researchers can connect to the global research ecosystem.
Facilitating indigenous knowledge sharing. There are currently many challenges surrounding indigenous knowledge recognition. Indigenous data and collections can be difficult to find , mislabeled, not properly attributed, not searchable; PID infrastructure can help enable recognition for indigenous knowledge. The focus in this area is to fund projects that support Indigenous data sovereignty through DOI registration and metadata.

Eligibility (Who can apply):

Representatives of non-profit stakeholders within the research ecosystem (e.g. research institutions, associations, NRENs, government bodies, service providers, etc.) based in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia can apply. Applicants should be authorized to apply on behalf of their organization (legal entity).
Applications are open to DataCite member and non-member organizations.
Both new and well-established organizations can apply.

Funding

The following funding levels are available for each one of the areas:

Outreach activities: up to US$10,000
Infrastructure development: up to US$20,000
Demonstrators: up to US$50,000

Timeline

Call for proposals launch: September 1, 2023.
Application due date: October 15, 2023.
Award decision: December 15, 2023.
Awarded projects duration: January 1 - December 31, 2024.