Étiquette : Africa

Catégories
EN

Open access publishing in an African context: Notable improvements and recurring challenges

Authors : Sodiq Onaolapo, Philips Ayeni, Siphamandla Mncube

Open access publishing has been promoted as a pivotal means of bridging the gap in knowledge access and usage. Despite the growing support for open access publishing globally, little is known about African scholars’ engagement with open access publishing and the barriers limiting their open access publishing practices.

Using a survey research design, data was collected from 241 researchers from selected universities in Africa, such as Nigerian, Kenyan and South African universities. The data was collected using online surveys and analysed using the descriptive statistics of frequency counts and percentages. T

he study reveals that while most of the respondents had published open access articles (78.01%) and had a positive perception of the quality of open access journals (73.45%) and editorial teams, more than half were still limited by article processing charges (58.51%) as they had no funding for their research.

Although African researchers are embracing open access publishing more now than they were historically, barriers such as article processing charges and the prolonged response time from reviewers continue to pose a serious challenge to open access uptake in Africa. This study proposes five recommendations for improving open access uptake in African and Global South countries.

URL : Open access publishing in an African context: Notable improvements and recurring challenges

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177/03400352251351113

Catégories
EN

The African Platform for Open Scholarship Advancing Diamond Open Access and Inclusivity

Authors : Reggie Raju, Saiansha Maharaj

Geographic, language, peer review, and editorial biases have to be navigated by Global South authors to get published. Initially, the open access movement was praised for bridging the information access divide.

However, commercial publishers have hijacked the philanthropic ethos, turning it into a business model. Publishing charges add to the aforementioned biases, consolidating the exclusion of Global South scholarship. The African Platform for Open Scholarship developed by the University of Cape Town (UCT) counters these biases by offering free publishing infrastructure to advance the publishing of African scholarship without compromising academic rigor.

The platform adopts the diamond open access model to demarginalize Global South scholarship. Further, there is a discussion on the challenges and opportunities associated with creating an inclusive and equitable scholarly communication ecosystem. This paper focuses on UCT’s use of the platform to transition its commercial publishing arm (UCT Press) and to grow UCT Libraries Press. The paper will use exemplars to demonstrate the positive impact of these initiatives on the growth of diamond open access.

URL : The African Platform for Open Scholarship Advancing Diamond Open Access and Inclusivity

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.18278

Catégories
EN

Factors that affect scientific publication in Africa—A gender perspective

Authors : Catherine Beaudry, Heidi Prozesky, Carl St-Pierre, Seyed Reza Mirnezami

A large body of literature on gender differences in scientific publication output has clearly established that women scientists publish less that men do. Yet, no single explanation or group of explanations satisfactorily accounts for this difference, which has been called the “productivity puzzle”.

To provide a more refined portrait of the scientific publication output of women in relation to that of their male peers, we conducted a web-based survey in 2016 of individual researchers across all African countries, except Libya.

The resulting 6,875 valid questionnaires submitted by respondents in the STEM, Health Science and SSH fields were analyzed using multivariate regressions on the self-reported number of articles published in the preceding 3 years. Controlling for a variety of variables including career stage, workload, mobility, research field, and collaboration, we measured the direct and moderating effect of gender on scientific production of African researchers.

Our results show that, while women’s scientific publication output is positively affected by collaboration and age (impediments to women’s scientific output decrease later in their careers), it is negatively impacted by care-work and household chores, limited mobility, and teaching hours.

Women are as prolific when they devote the same hours to other academic tasks and raise the same amount of research funding as their male colleagues.

Our results lead us to argue that the standard academic career model, relying on continuous publications and regular promotions, assumes a masculine life cycle that reinforces the general perception that women with discontinuous careers are less productive than their male colleagues, and systematically disadvantages women.

We conclude that the solution resides beyond women’s empowerment, i.e., in the broader institutions of education and the family, which have an important role to play in fostering men’s equal contribution to household chores and care-work.

URL : Factors that affect scientific publication in Africa—A gender perspective

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2023.1040823

Catégories
EN

The status of the digital preservation policies and plans of the institutional repositories of selected public universities in Kenya

Authors : Hellen Ndegwa, Emily Bosire, Damaris Odero

Institutional repositories (IRs) have a leading role in providing long-term access to the research output of universities. This study assessed the capabilities of institutional repositories in Kenya to support long-term preservation of digital content by reviewing digital preservation policies and plans.

Data was collected through face-to-face interviews from 19 respondents drawn from three public universities that were identified by their registration in OpenDOAR, ROARMAP and the number of items in their repositories.

Additional data was acquired through analysis of documents such as open access policies and mandates, as well as institutional websites. Findings revealed that the organizations were poorly prepared to support long-term digital preservation.

Policies were inadequate and plans to support the implementation of the policies were lacking. The study concluded that although the IRs were to undertake digital preservation, they lacked clearly defined actions from plans and policy.

This article offers recommendations, including identifying digital preservation goals that will guide policy formulation and multi-stakeholder involvement in the policy-making process. Effort should also be made to create awareness of the relationship between digital content selection and its successful long-term preservation.

URL : The status of the digital preservation policies and plans of the institutional repositories of selected public universities in Kenya

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.590

Catégories
EN

Open Science in Africa: What policymakers should consider

Authors : Elisha R. T. Chiware, Lara Skelly

As Open Science (OS) is being promoted as the best avenue to share and drive scientific discoveries at much lower costs and in transparent and credible ways, it is imperative that African governments and institutions take advantage of the momentum and build research infrastructures that are responsive to this movement.

This paper aims to provide useful insight into the importance and implementation of OS policy frameworks. The paper uses a systematic review approach to review existing literature and analyse global OS policy development documents. The approach includes a review of existing OS policy frameworks that can guide similar work by African governments and institutions.

This critical review also makes recommendations on key issues that Africa should consider in the process of OS policy development. These approaches can be widely used as further foundations for future developments in OS practices on the continent.

URL : Open Science in Africa: What policymakers should consider

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2022.950139

Catégories
EN

Open access in Angola: a survey among higher education institutions

Authors : Wileidys Artigas, Eurico Wongo Gungula, Mikael Laakso

Open access (OA) to research publications is of global relevance, both in terms of provision and consumption of scholarly content. However, much of the research, practice, and models surrounding OA have been centered around the Global North.

In this study we investigate how and to what degree higher education institutions (HEIs) in Angola interact with the concept of OA to journal publications through their policies and practices, a country where the end of the civil war in 2002 marked a new start for growth in teaching and research.

This study is based on an online survey conducted in 2020 among research management units of Angolan HEIs. 23 valid institutional responses were received of 44 invitations sent (52% response rate).

The results suggest that Angolan HEIs have moderate awareness of OA but practical incorporation into academic processes has remained slow, however, this can be seen to be connected to the overall slow progress in ramping up research intensity in the country.

Seven of the responding institutions reported to be involved in publishing scholarly journals, all of them OA. Overall Angolan HEIs have few institutional repositories, and have so far placed little value on OA in the context of academic career advancement.

URL : Open access in Angola: a survey among higher education institutions

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04410-w

Catégories
EN

Social justice driving open access publishing: an African perspective

Authors : Reggie Raju, Auliya Badrudeen

The OA movement is generally considered to have been founded for the truly philanthropic purpose of promoting equity and inclusivity in access to scholarship. For Africans, this meant the opening of the research ecosystem to marginalized research communities who could then freely make use of shared research to aid in the socio-economic development and emancipation of the continent.

However, this philanthropic purpose has been deviated from, leading instead to the disenfranchisement of the African research community. Through systemic inequalities embedded in the scholarly ecosystem, the publishing landscape has been northernised, with research from the global north sitting at the very top of the knowledge hierarchy to the exclusion of Africa and other parts of the global south.

For this reason, progressive open access practices and policies need to be adopted, with an emphasis on social justice as an impetus, to enhance the sharing and recognition of African scholarship, while also bridging the ‘research-exchange’ divide that exists between the global south and north.

Furthermore, advocates of open access must collaborate to create equal opportunities for African voices to participate in the scholarly landscape through the creation and dissemination of global south research. Thusly, the continental platform was developed by the University of Cape Town.

This platform was developed around the concept of a tenant model to act as a contributor to social justice-driven open access advocacy, and as a disruptor of the unjust knowledge hierarchies that exist.

URL : Social justice driving open access publishing: an African perspective

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.1910