Category Archives: oa.zambia

Knowledge and experience of Zambian teaching faculties with scholarly communication and dissemination practices | Emerald Insight

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Abstract:  Purpose

This paper aims to investigate the knowledge and experience of Zambian teaching faculties with scholarly communication and dissemination practices.

Design/methodology/approach

The researchers used a survey to quickly obtain information about a large sample of individuals of interest. The study population consisted of faculties from two Zambian public universities with research and publication experience. The researchers used random sampling techniques. A total of 125 valid responses were received from the selected population.

Findings

The findings show that most respondents agreed that publishing in open-access journals increased visibility and readership, had a more significant impact, facilitated collaboration and interdisciplinary research, was cost-effective and provided accessibility. Google Scholar was the most commonly used platform, followed by ResearchGate and ORCID.

Research limitations/implications

This study’s limitations focus on only two Zambian public universities. This study’s practical implications include improving the universities’ open-access policies and educating faculties on the benefits of open access.

Originality/value

This study’s originality lies in exploring the Zambian teaching faculties’ perceptions of open access and academic social networking sites. The results of this study can help universities and researchers in Zambia to understand the importance of scholarly communication and dissemination practices and help them implement effective policies for promoting open-access publishing, institutional repositories and academic social networking sites.

Consultancy to Develop National Research Repository for Zambia

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“UNICEF has now issued a Request for Proposals in order to select a supplier for the provisions of consultancy services to Develop National Research Repository BACKGROUND The Government of the Republic of Zambia is placing increasing emphasis on data and evidence for use in planning resource allocation and implementation of national development policies and programmes. This was evident in the development of the 8th National Development Plan and other downstream line nistry planning processes. The Ministry of National Development and Planning (MoFNP) uses evidence to set development priorities by identifying effective financing and implementation modalities to ensure achievement of intended development results Analysis of the country’s research and evaluation ecosystem, however, reveals significant data gaps Ministry of Finance and Nations Planning with support by UNICEF hosted a stakeholder workshop in 2022 to identify and agree on gaps and solutions. One of the biggest gaps defied in the data and research ecosystem is non-accessibility of data and research outputs for decision making by policy makers and advocacy itutions. There is a lack of coordination and linkage among key research stakeholders as demonstrated by fragmentation in the flow of data and research and evaluation outputs in the knowledge ecosysteen. Stakeholers work in silos in the production and dissemination of evidence which leach to hoth the underumisation of already existing research and evaluation evidence, and the duplication of work. Further, while a few nammers have repestones that are open, there is currently no online platform to coordinate open access research outputs national level hence limiting accessibility of both data and research and evaluation products to users. As a result, we are recruiting an institutional contractor to condum a date and endence workflow, culminating in a research repository. Objective of Consultancy The overall objective of the consultancy is design and develop a web-based knowledge sharing platform that will leverage on existing institutional repositories to upload and share research up to enhance owledge dissemination and evidence-based decision-making in Zambia. To develop ZaRR, the institution will undertake a scoping exercise of the research environment in the country to ascertain key stakeholders in the research ecosystem, assess the types of research outputs and how they are disseminated, establish which institutions have existing repositories and make recommendations on how they can he coordinated to enhance research access and utilisation through a national research repository. The institution will also recommend administrative responsibilities of key institutions in ZARR, and conduct capacity building of the administrative staff identified.”

 

Democratizing Higher Education in Zambia Through Open Access Data · TCC Africa webcasts

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“What steps has the Ministry taken in democratizing higher education through open access (partnerships, access to infrastructure and data)

What are the challenges that have arisen and also what opportunities has the Ministry taken advantage of in using open access and open science in democratizing higher education in Zambia

What does the future hold for the Zambia academic community with open access? …”

Plan S and the Global South – What do countries in the Global South stand to gain from signing up to Europe’s open access strategy? | Impact of Social Sciences

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“Plan S raises challenging questions for the Global South. Even if Plan S fails to achieve its objectives the growing determination in Europe to trigger a “global flip” to open access suggests developing countries will have to develop an alternative strategy. In this post Richard Poynder asks: what might that strategy be?…”

The SASSCAL contribution to climate observation, climate data management and data rescue in Southern Africa

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Abstract. A major task of the newly established “Southern African Science Service Centre for Climate Change and Adaptive Land Management” (SASSCAL; www.sasscal.org) and its partners is to provide science-based environmental information and knowledge which includes the provision of consistent and reliable climate data for Southern Africa. Hence, SASSCAL, in close cooperation with the national weather authorities of Angola, Botswana, Germany and Zambia as well as partner institutions in Namibia and South Africa, supports the extension of the regional meteorological observation network and the improvement of the climate archives at national level. With the ongoing rehabilitation of existing weather stations and the new installation of fully automated weather stations (AWS), altogether 105 AWS currently provide a set of climate variables at 15, 30 and 60 min intervals respectively. These records are made available through the SASSCAL WeatherNet, an online platform providing near-real time data as well as various statistics and graphics, all in open access. This effort is complemented by the harmonization and improvement of climate data management concepts at the national weather authorities, capacity building activities and an extension of the data bases with historical climate data which are still available from different sources. These activities are performed through cooperation between regional and German institutions and will provide important information for climate service related activities.