Nigeria’s research and education landscape is taking a significant step forward with RUMBU – a national, multitenant institutional repository platform designed to strengthen open access and scholarly communication across the country’s universities. RUMBU is a community-driven effort to complement the infrastructure established under TETFund’s TeRAS initiative.

While TeRAS provides a strong national framework and currently hosts a dedicated repository for electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), RUMBU fills a critical gap – offering Nigerian institutions a general-purpose repository for all forms of scholarly outputs. From datasets and articles to preprints and grey literature, RUMBU will allow universities to store, manage, and share a wide variety of digital research assets within a shared, scalable, and open-source environment.

TeRAS provides the overarching research infrastructure and a home for ETDs, while RUMBU builds the next layer of openness, giving institutions the flexibility to host broader research content and experiment with new dissemination models. Together, they form a cohesive national framework for open scholarship, where repositories are interconnected and interoperable, serving both institutional and national needs.

By pooling resources through a multitenant model, each participating institution will benefit from its own space, branding, and autonomy – while still contributing to a collaborative national ecosystem. RUMBU will ensure that institutions, regardless of size or technical capacity, can participate in the open science movement without the heavy cost of standalone repository infrastructure.

What makes RUMBU truly distinctive is its community-led governance model. There is a shared decision-making framework for participating institutions to shape how the platform evolves – ensuring that RUMBU reflects local needs while staying aligned with international best practices. This collaborative governance embodies the spirit of open infrastructure: transparent, inclusive, and locally owned.

Furthermore, RUMBU’s metadata framework, harmonised with Dublin Core, JPCOAR, and RIOXX standards, will ensure that Nigerian research is discoverable globally. Integration with ORCID, eduID.ng, and Persistent Identifier (PID) services like PIDsLink and ROR will also enhance the visibility, traceability, and credibility of local research outputs.

For Nigerian universities, RUMBU represents a transformative opportunity — not only to showcase their research to the world but to reclaim ownership of scholarly communication through open, community-led infrastructure.

By lowering technical and financial barriers, promoting collaboration, and strengthening links with global research identity systems, RUMBU ensures that Nigerian scholarship gains the visibility and recognition it deserves.

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