(25 May 2021) Joy Owango, Executive Director of the Training Centre in Communication based in the University of Nairobi, Kenya, gives an overview of how African countries are working together toward the goal of open science. The centre she currently oversees provides capacity support in improving researchers output and visibility through training in scholarly and science communication.
“African researchers have taken advantage of open science and Open Access, as evidenced by the increase of Open Access publications. Open science publishing infrastructures like the Africa Academy of Sciences Open Research Platform and African community led preprint repository AfricArxiv has led to innovative Open Access publishing offering rapid publication and open review whilst supporting data deposition, with the former supporting African Academy of Sciences fellows, and the latter supporting research done by Africans or non-Africans conducting research on and about Africa…. for the longest time, higher education stakeholders worked in silos. Each higher education institute (HEI) has an expectation of researchers to produce good quality outputs and increase their visibility. By bringing them together they can seamlessly provide uniform access to Dimensions in their respective countries. We brought together research councils, granting councils, university commissions and library consortia and trained them in using Dimensions to support their academic and research communities using open science.
How does this work? As gatekeepers, library consortia are responsible for the negotiation and access to literary resources used in their institutes, while research councils regulate and monitor output done by research institutes, and granting councils fund research and the university commissions are responsible for regulating and monitoring universities performance. All these HEIs and other higher education stakeholders agree on the importance of open science, its philosophy, and how Open Access can support increasing research output and visibility coming out of their countries.”
Read the full post from Joy here.
