The academic research community in West and Central Africa has explored new approaches, solutions, and services to raise Africa’s research profile on the global stage. The community is poised to change the narrative – the least contributor to the global knowledge economy, as stipulated by UNESCO.

At the LIBSENSE Regional Leadership Meeting on Research Policies and Practices, speakers and participants from across national university leadership in West Africa identified the need for a concerted effort to achieve a culture of research excellence in the region.

Participants, including the leadership of vice-chancellors and rectors of West African higher education institutions, reached a consensus on the need to institutionalise quality mentorship, sustainable funding for research, prioritising and modelling research excellence, and research integrity in Africa.

Participants expressed concern about the current trend of assessing researchers based on publication. It emerged that the prevailing culture has compromised research integrity, incentivised the impact factor of journals, commercialisation, and forgoing the research output for the journal publication. The outcomes of unethical research practices include a disconnect between research and society and a loss of trust in the research process. It was recommended that responsible research assessment has a broader application and must be negotiated with stakeholders.

Building relevant infrastructure to support research excellence and visibility

To make research outputs visible and accessible without boundaries, WACREN has collaborated with the National Institute of Informatics (NII) to make WEKO3 research infrastructure accessible to WACREN national communities. Participants at the LIBSENSE-Connect II workshop, which preceded the LIBSENSE Leadership Meeting, discussed the benefits and technical requirements for a shared national repository service. Workshop participants practically streamlined the recently developed Common Metadata Schema for Nigeria with the Rioxx 3. The participating institutions developed a roadmap for transitioning to the WEKO3 platform. Integrating the roadmap into a project plan and conducting a pilot with Eko-Konnect is underway.

The stage is set for further engagements to integrate the national repository services in Nigeria, The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Côte D’Ivoire, and Ghana into the multi-tenanted WEKO3 platform.

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