Beall participates in conference, training workshop in Iraq

Jeffrey Beall, associate professor at CU Denver and Scholarly Initiatives librarian for the Auraria Campus, recently returned from Iraq. He traveled to the Middle East to help conduct a conference and workshop. The three-day event in Erbil was presented by the Institute of International Education (IIE, the company that manages the Fulbright Program) and sponsored by the U.S. State Department.

Held in early February, the conference revolved around academic research in higher education institutional success. The goal was to expand on themes and topics introduced in prior conferences and provide strategies for maximizing scholarly research within Iraqi universities, as well as to address how to successfully teach research skills to students.

Beall was one of three invited speakers brought in for the workshop. He was invited to speak about scholarly communication and his specialty, predatory publishers.

The attendees were all Iraqis. About half were university administrators (deans, department chairs, etc.), and about half were beneficiaries of the Iraq Scholar Rescue Project, a part of IIE's Scholar Rescue Fund.

“On the first day of the conference,” Beall said, “I met Dr. Nasser G. Yousif, one of the participants in the Iraq Scholar Rescue Project. Coincidentally, he is working at the CU Anschutz Medical Campus. We struck up a friendship, and both of us were delighted to discover that we each had a colleague attending the workshop.”

Beall currently is on sabbatical.