After successfully securing funding from ORCID’s Global Participation Fund (GPF), WACREN has laid out plans to drive the adoption of ORCID at the regional level to enhance the visibility and discoverability of scholarly output in West and Central Africa. The Global Participation Fund (GPF) is a grant program established by ORCID in 2022 to increase global participation in its research identity system, particularly across the Global South. The ORCID-WACA project stood out in the Community Development & Outreach category due to its focus on increasing ORCID adoption in West and Central African institutions and supporting ORCID’s mission to close participation gaps in the Global South. What the ORCID–WACA Project Will Do The ORCID–WACA Initiative will strengthen ORCID awareness and adoption across West and Central Africa, addressing persistent barriers that have limited the visibility of African research. The project builds directly on WACREN’s existing infrastructure and initiatives and will deliver several key activities: Train and mentor 15 ORCID Ambassadors: This regional cohort will provide on-the-ground awareness to reach African researchers, institutions, and professional networks through workshops and outreach. Raise awareness among at least 1,000 African researchers and professionals: Through structured workshops and webinars, communication campaigns, the project aims to increase awareness and adoption of ORCID across West and Central Africa. Establish a Community of Practice (CoP): The ORCID–WACA CoP will serve as a collaborative space for researchers, librarians, repository managers, and research administrators across the region who are working to strengthen researcher identification, attribution, and institutional visibility. Build a Regional Integration Hub: This hub will simplify institutional participation in the ORCID ecosystem and support long-term adoption. Advancing WACREN’s Open Science Strategy This GPF award directly reinforces WACREN’s broader strategy to underpin open science across the region. WACREN’s open scholarly infrastructure — including an open publishing platform, an institutional repository service, and PIDsLink, a persistent identifiers platform that assigns Archival Resource Keys (ARKs) — already provides a foundation for visibility, discoverability, and long-term access to African scholarship. The ORCID GPF initiative aligns with WACREN’s for this infrastructure, enabling thousands of researchers to gain global visibility while strengthening the interconnected ecosystem that supports researchers, editors, and journals.
