Category Archives: oa.africarxiv

Let us create a globally inclusive dialogue on Open Science Hardware (OSH) standards – AfricArXiv

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“Hardware is a vital part of experiments process and advances in instrumentation have been central to scientific revolutions by expanding observations beyond standard human senses.” But making hardware and especially sharing hardware is neither an easy nor a recognized task in academia. In order to tackle this issue, some of us started a Research Data Alliance (RDA) interest group. The RDA is a social platform where international research data experts meet to exchange views and to agree on topical issues. We think the RDA label will bring our work the credibility needed to develop and push our ideas about Research hardware recognition in the scholarly communication ecosystem. On the other hand, we would like to avoid the pitfall of creating a system that would nurture inequalities, and one of our objectives is therefore to grow and diversify the group members and chairs. Here is therefore a call for participation, it is particularly but not uniquely addressed to researchers from low-income countries.

How PIDs & Preprints are facilitating the ownership of African scholarly content

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“As part of the NISO.plus conference 2021 in the session “Quality and reliability of preprints, Ms Joy Owango presented the work AfricArXiv and TCC Africa are doing in facilitating ownership of African scholarly content using persistent identifiers.”

COAR, TCC Africa and AfricArXiv sign partnership agreement – AfricArXiv

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“We are pleased to announce that the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) and TCC Africa in collaboration with AfricArXiv have signed a partnership agreement focused on strengthening capacity and infrastructure for Open Science in Africa. …

The aim of the partnership is to work together to foster the concept of bibliodiversity through information sharing, capacity building, and advocacy work, as well as enable AfricArXiv to engage with international peers in Africa and globally about best practices and next generation repository functionalities….”

AfricArXiv – the African preprint repository – Open Collective

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“In April 2018, the seed for AfricArXiv was planted during the 2nd AfricaOSH summit in Kumasi, Ghana with this historic tweet

In June that same year, we joined forces with The Center for Open Science and launched a branded preprint service. Early in 2020 we extended our Open Access platform to a community

collection on Zenodo and initiated a partnership with ScienceOpen, with whom we are running AfricArXiv preprints and curating a collection of COVID-19 research from and about Africa.

Shortly after that and as an innovative and immediate response to the pandemic, we partnered with Knowledge Futures Group to provide a platform for audio/visual preprints on PubPub. Next, we plan to add Figshare and PKP/OPS to the list of our partner repositories. 

Since we work to foster community among African researchers, we were excited to launch a petition in 2019 to sign the African Principles for Open Access in Scholarly Communication https://info.africarxiv.org/african-oa-principles/. The petition is ongoing, so you can still add your name to it. Published under CC-BY licence, anyone can Share and Adapt the principles while giving appropriate credit ‘African Principles for Open Access in Scholarly Communication as agreed upon by the signatories‘, provide a link to the principles, and indicate if changes were made.

We announced our strategic partnerships with the Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education (IGDORE), Open Knowledge Map and ScienceOpen. ORCID and AfricArXiv initiated joint efforts to assist African scientists in advancing their careers through unique identifiers. 

Since the beginning of the pandemic in March, we collect, create and disseminate a wealth of resources, ideas and guidelines around COVID-19 in Africa. 

We have received and accepted around 200 submissions in total across our partner repositories….”

Service fees for OSF preprint hosting and maintenance – AfricArXiv continues its services – AfricArXiv

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“We are continuing our services throughout 2020 and are working on a roadmap and finance strategy to sustain operations for years to come and embed AfricArXiv in the growing Open Science landscape on the African continent….”