New Program Targets Nigeria and Ghana to Increase Visibility of African Research

WACREN partners with the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) in LIBSENSE to promote cognitive justice in the Global South. Open access initiatives have the potential to disseminate knowledge equitably; however, they can also lead to a new form of imbalance, where knowledge flows from the global North to the South while the unique wisdom and scholarship of the Global South are overlooked.

The DOAJ ambassador program collaboration helps WACREN to address this information gap by educating and training ambassadors and volunteers to engage with publishers, advocate for best practices, and promote transparency and editorial standards. The ultimate goal is to increase the representation of journals from developing countries in the DOAJ index., especially those using languages other than English.

The program will leverage existing infrastructure and national models developed in AfricaConnect3 for NRENs and initially focus on Nigeria and Ghana, providing training on open science practices for universities and publishers in these countries and facilitating interactions between ambassadors and local stakeholders to create a more equitable and inclusive knowledge-sharing ecosystem. Awareness raising for Nigeria starts with a webinar on August 31 on the importance of publishing research open access in local journals for policymakers, scholars and publishers.

This will set the stage for an in-person workshop with DOAJ and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) in the second iteration of the LIBSENSE Open Science Symposium in Nigeria on September 14, 2023, at the CVCNU Secretariat in Abuja. The symposium is co-hosted by the Committee of Vice-Chancellors of Nigerian Universities (CVCNU) and the Association of University Librarians of Nigerian Universities (AULNU). The participants at this workshop will kick off the next phase of activities with selected publishers and partner institutions.