Nigeria’s Open Access Summit Advances WACREN’s Vision for Community-Led Scholarly Publishing

When Nigeria’s academic and research community gathered in Abuja for the National Summit on Open Access Book Publishing, the message was clear: knowledge created in Nigeria must serve the public good and remain in public hands.

The two-day summit themed “From Pilots to Policy” – brought together leaders from the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), the National Universities Commission (NUC), universities and members of the scholarly community across Nigeria to begin conversations on a national framework for open access book publishing. Beyond policy talk, the event marked a turning point in how Nigerian institutions are taking ownership of their scholarly outputs and aligning with broader African efforts toward open science.

In his keynote address, WACREN’s Chief Strategy Officer, Omo Oaiya, emphasised African ownership, collaboration, and the need for interoperable digital platforms that connect repositories and publishing systems across the region. He described WACREN’s role in catalysing open access through the LIBSENSE programme.

The summit’s focus on interoperability, shared infrastructure, and coordinated national policy strongly reflected WACREN’s open access strategy. Participants agreed on the need for a National Coordination Framework that links institutional repositories and harmonises policies – a vision that complements TERAS, TETFund’s national aggregation platform. Integrating TERAS into the LIBSENSE ecosystem would help ensure that Nigerian research outputs become part of a wider, discoverable African knowledge network.

Discussions also highlighted the human side of open access – the librarians, editors, and scholars driving institutional change. Their collective call for capacity building, rights management literacy, and the inclusion of indigenous knowledge aligns with LIBSENSE’s community-driven approach to building equitable and sustainable open infrastructures.

The summit affirmed that national action and regional collaboration are two sides of the same coin. Nigeria’s commitment to community-led publishing provides a powerful example of how local innovation, guided by shared African values, can transform the landscape of scholarly communication.