Academic libraries in four Sub-Saharan Africa countries and their role in propagating open science

IFLA Journal ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 242-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Onauphoo Siyao ◽  
Fidelia M. Whong ◽  
Ebenezer Martin-Yeboah ◽  
Annet Namamonde
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Academic Libraries ◽  
Case Study Research ◽  
Open Science ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Natural Setting ◽  
Institutional Repositories ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Emerging Media ◽  
Sub Saharan

The study aims at examining libraries in four Sub-Saharan Africa countries and their role in propagating open science. It also seeks to explore existing open science practices, ascertain the level of participation of academic libraries in open science activities, identify the strategies used in marketing open science platforms and enumerate the challenges hindering the success of open science in the selected countries. The study was guided by the qualitative school of thought where the researcher builds a complex, holistic picture, analyses words, and reports detailed views of informants, and conducts the study in a natural setting. The study employed the multiple case study research design approach to assess how academic libraries in Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda promote open science. The findings show that there are few scholarly journals which exist in open access for most African academies in Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda. Though not massively adopted, open access institutional repositories have been used to preserve and publicize the digital contents in some academic institutions in Africa such as theses, dissertations, administrative and heritage materials, conference proceedings as well as pre-prints and post-print of journal articles. The study recommends the intensification of open science advocacy in academic libraries in Sub-Saharan Africa; institutions should ensure that there is a stable electricity supply as well as reliable internet connectivity, introducing regular training on emerging media technologies to the community members and strengthening the libraries consortium in Sub-Saharan Africa as an enabling platform to share intellectual productivity of their member countries.

scholarly journals Open-access policy and data-sharing practice in UK academia

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yimei Zhu
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Data Sharing ◽  
Secondary Data ◽  
Open Science ◽  
Research Data ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Free Access ◽  
Online Publishing ◽  
Institutional Repositories ◽  
Access To Data

Data sharing can be defined as the release of research data that can be used by others. With the recent open-science movement, there has been a call for free access to data, tools and methods in academia. In recent years, subject-based and institutional repositories and data centres have emerged along with online publishing. Many scientific records, including published articles and data, have been made available via new platforms. In the United Kingdom, most major research funders had a data policy and require researchers to include a ‘data-sharing plan’ when applying for funding. However, there are a number of barriers to the full-scale adoption of data sharing. Those barriers are not only technical, but also psychological and social. A survey was conducted with over 1800 UK-based academics to explore the extent of support of data sharing and the characteristics and factors associated with data-sharing practice. It found that while most academics recognised the importance of sharing research data, most of them had never shared or reused research data. There were differences in the extent of data sharing between different gender, academic disciplines, age and seniority. It also found that the awareness of Research Council UK’s (RCUK) Open-Access (OA) policy, experience of Gold and Green OA publishing, attitudes towards the importance of data sharing and experience of using secondary data were associated with the practice of data sharing. A small group of researchers used social media such as Twitter, blogs and Facebook to promote the research data they had shared online. Our findings contribute to the knowledge and understanding of open science and offer recommendations to academic institutions, journals and funding agencies.

A conceptual model of Open Access Institutional Repository in Indonesia academic libraries

2015 ◽  
Vol 36 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 168-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ida Farida ◽  
Jann Hidajat Tjakraatmadja ◽  
Aries Firman ◽  
Sulistyo Basuki
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Conceptual Model ◽  
Academic Libraries ◽  
Academic Library ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Institutional Repositories ◽  
Global Access ◽  
Knowledge Content ◽  
Collaboration Process ◽  
The University

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to attempt to build a conceptual model of Open Access Institutional Repositories (OAIR) in Indonesia academic libraries, viewed from knowledge management (KM) perspective. Design/methodology/approach – Literature-based conceptual analysis of previous studies related to open access, institutional repositories viewed from KM perpective. Findings – The conceptual model of OAIR emphasizes three variables – people collaboration, process, and technology functions. These variables, with their many elements, are integrated together in order to help the university or Higher Education (HE) institution in capturing its own scholarship produced as a whole. Besides, that integration aims at facilitating knowledge sharing so as to enrich knowledge content and to enhance global access. A process chart of OAIR based on the conceptual model is built to illustrate knowledge content recruitment in Indonesia academic libraries. Research limitations/implications – The conceptual model proposed in this paper is not yet formally tested. It needs more research to understand the Indonesian context of OAIR to build a more accurate model, based on the experiences in developing and implementing OAIR in Indonesia HE institutions. Originality/value – Many academic libraries in Indonesia develop OAIR to increase the visibility of the scholarship of the parent HE institution. It is significant to view the practice of OAIR in academic library from the KM perspective. KM implementation is almost unheard of in Indonesia universities. However, The OAIR phenomenon in Indonesia academic libraries can be viewed as a KM initiative.

scholarly journals Social, Behavioral, and Cultural factors of HIV in Malawi: Semi-Automated Systematic Review

10.2196/18747 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (8) ◽  
pp. e18747
Author(s):  
Amaury Thiabaud ◽  
Isotta Triulzi ◽  
Erol Orel ◽  
Kali Tal ◽  
Olivia Keiser
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Review ◽  
Open Access ◽  
Hiv Infection ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Topic Modelling ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Quantitative Analyses ◽  
Sub Saharan

Background Demographic and sociobehavioral factors are strong drivers of HIV infection rates in sub-Saharan Africa. These factors are often studied in qualitative research but ignored in quantitative analyses. However, they provide in-depth insight into the local behavior and may help to improve HIV prevention. Objective To obtain a comprehensive overview of the sociobehavioral factors influencing HIV prevalence and incidence in Malawi, we systematically reviewed the literature using a newly programmed tool for automatizing part of the systematic review process. Methods Due to the choice of broad search terms (“HIV AND Malawi”), our preliminary search revealed many thousands of articles. We, therefore, developed a Python tool to automatically extract, process, and categorize open-access articles published from January 1, 1987 to October 1, 2019 in the PubMed, PubMed Central, JSTOR, Paperity, and arXiV databases. We then used a topic modelling algorithm to classify and identify publications of interest. Results Our tool extracted 22,709 unique articles; 16,942 could be further processed. After topic modelling, 519 of these were clustered into relevant topics, of which 20 were kept after manual screening. We retrieved 7 more publications after examining the references so that 27 publications were finally included in the review. Reducing the 16,942 articles to 519 potentially relevant articles using the software took 5 days. Several factors contributing to the risk of HIV infection were identified, including religion, gender and relationship dynamics, beliefs, and sociobehavioral attitudes. Conclusions Our software does not replace traditional systematic reviews, but it returns useful results to broad queries of open-access literature in under a week, without a priori knowledge. This produces a “seed dataset” of relevance that could be further developed. It identified known factors and factors that may be specific to Malawi. In the future, we aim to expand the tool by adding more social science databases and applying it to other sub-Saharan African countries.

scholarly journals Sharing published short academic works in institutional repositories after six months

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Jeroen Sondervan ◽  
Arjan Schalken ◽  
Jan de Boer ◽  
Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Scale Up ◽  
Policy Instrument ◽  
Open Science ◽  
National Plan ◽  
Institutional Repositories ◽  
Green Route ◽  
Academic Publications ◽  
Dutch Universities

The ambition of the Netherlands, laid down in the National Plan Open Science, is to achieve 100% open access for academic publications. The ambition was to be achieved by 2020. However, it is to be expected that for the year 2020 between 70% and 75% of the articles will be open access. Until recently, the focus of the Netherlands has been on the gold route - open access via journals and publishers’ platforms. This is likely to be costly and it is also impossible to cover all articles and other publication types this way. Since 2015, Dutch Copyright Act has offered an alternative with the implementation of Article 25fa (also known as the ‘Taverne Amendment’), facilitating the green route, i.e. open access via (trusted) repositories. This amendment allows researchers to share short scientific works (e.g. articles and book chapters in edited collections), regardless of any restrictive guidelines from publishers. From February 2019 until August 2019 all Dutch universities participated in the pilot ‘You Share, we Take Care!’ to test how this copyright amendment could be interpreted and implemented by institutions as a policy instrument to enhance green open access and “self-archiving”. In 2020 steps were taken to scale up further implementation of the amendment. This article describes the outcomes of this pilot and shares best practices on implementation and awareness activities in the period following the pilot until early 2021, in which libraries have played an instrumental role in building trust and working on effective implementations on an institutional level. It concludes with some possible next steps for alignment, for example on a European level.

scholarly journals Community Driven Open Science

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian O’Connor
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Open Science ◽  
Academic Community ◽  
Data Repository ◽  
Global Level ◽  
Institutional Repositories ◽  
Chemical Database ◽  
Share Data ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Database Service

>> See video of presentation (23 min.) The Royal Society of Chemistry is committed to supporting open science in the UK and at a global level. Our recently launched Chemical Sciences Article Repository provides a subject-specific repository for hosting research outputs, including ‘green’ open access articles from our own authors, and published ‘gold’ articles. We are working with institutional repositories and other publishers to include links to articles on their own sites, ensuring maximum visibility and usage of their own content. Our aim is to ensure compliance with open access mandates is as simple as possible for researchers in the chemical sciences and related disciplines. This complements our Gold for Gold initiative launched in 2012. We plan to expand the Chemical Sciences Repository to include other types of publications, research data and tools. Currently we are building a data repository for the UK academic community as part of our EPSRC funding for hosting the National Chemical Database Service (an EPSRC mid-range facility). This will allow researchers to deposit, access and share data, but allow the flexibility to only share data privately if preferred. Using our expertise from developing ChemSpider, our flagship free chemical database, search functionality and accessibility of the data within the repository will be optimised for the chemical scientist.

Digitize or Perish

2014 ◽  
pp. 111-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Asunka
Keyword(s):  
Information And Communication Technology ◽  
Communication Technology ◽  
Academic Libraries ◽  
Information Seeking ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Library Resources ◽  
Information And Communication ◽  
Ict Tools ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Digital Formats

In today’s knowledge and technology driven society, most scholarly information is increasingly being produced and distributed in digital formats. Yet, in Sub-Saharan Africa, academic libraries have been very slow at joining this digital movement, and hence stand the risk of losing their relevance, particularly with regard to locally generated intellectual material. To better serve the knowledge and information seeking needs of their patrons, librarians need to reinvent services. The challenges are discussed as well as prescriptions of workable strategies that librarians, information scientists, and other stakeholders can adopt to overcome these barriers. Such strategies mostly involve appropriately leveraging the existing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools and resources to make library resources more accessible. Consequently, digitizing indigenous intellectual resources may keep libraries from perishing and respond to user needs and information seeking habits in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Open Access and the Future of Scholarly Communication in Sub-Saharan Africa

2021 ◽  
pp. 205-220
Author(s):  
Tuesday Bwalya ◽  
Akakandelwa Akakandelwa
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Scholarly Communication ◽  
Information Resources ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Open Access Publishing ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Improve Access

The concept of open access has opened up access to scholarly communication. Academia today can publish and have access to a cocktail of information resources without restrictions and without paying anything. This chapter seeks to explain open access to scholarly communication and its future in Sub-Saharan Africa. The chapter begins by explaining the concept of open access, various forms of open access publishing, benefits of open access, and a brief history of open access to scholarly communication in Sub-Saharan Africa. The chapter also highlights some notable open access initiatives that have been implemented in Sub-Saharan Africa in the quest to improve access to scientific research findings in order to accelerate economic development. Furthermore, the chapter catalogues some challenges being encountered in the promotion of open access in Sub-Saharan Africa. Lastly, the chapter predicts the future of open access to scholarly communication in Sub-Saharan Africa, based on the current happenings in this sector.

Digitize or Perish

2015 ◽  
pp. 933-947
Author(s):  
Stephen Asunka
Keyword(s):  
Information And Communication Technology ◽  
Communication Technology ◽  
Academic Libraries ◽  
Information Seeking ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Library Resources ◽  
Information And Communication ◽  
Ict Tools ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Digital Formats

In today's knowledge and technology driven society, most scholarly information is increasingly being produced and distributed in digital formats. Yet, in Sub-Saharan Africa, academic libraries have been very slow at joining this digital movement, and hence stand the risk of losing their relevance, particularly with regard to locally generated intellectual material. To better serve the knowledge and information seeking needs of their patrons, librarians need to reinvent services. The challenges are discussed as well as prescriptions of workable strategies that librarians, information scientists, and other stakeholders can adopt to overcome these barriers. Such strategies mostly involve appropriately leveraging the existing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools and resources to make library resources more accessible. Consequently, digitizing indigenous intellectual resources may keep libraries from perishing and respond to user needs and information seeking habits in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Access to Scholarly Research Information in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Review

Libri ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thembani Malapela
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Scientific Information ◽  
Information Access ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Global Knowledge ◽  
Research Information ◽  
Scholarly Research ◽  
Major Barrier ◽  
Sub Saharan

AbstractSince the year 2000, the world has witnessed an increased call for improved access to scholarly information. The cost of scholarly content is a major barrier in accessing needed research information. In order to fully contribute to the global knowledge economy, African scholars need to access both global information resources and locally published works. Few studies have focused on the African knowledge production vis-à-vis access to scholarly research information in Africa. This paper examines access to scholarly research information in sub-Saharan Africa. The review focuses on available published works on access to scientific literature in Africa and seeks to understand Africa’s scholarly publishing scene. In the process, challenges and opportunities regarding access to scholarly research information are explored. Three approaches in addressing these issues emerge in literature – namely (i) open access, (ii) donor-funded schemes and (iii) negotiated access schemes for scholarly content. This review shows that these approaches have leveraged information access to the African researchers who now have almost the same levels of access to scientific literature as their peers in the developed world. African governments, institutions, researchers and librarians still need to exploit the potential of open access. There remain, however, infrastructural issues that need to be addressed to ensure that the African scholar enjoys access to current scientific information.

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