WACREN is a recipient of ORCID’s Global Participation Fund (GPF). This award marks a significant milestone in WACREN’s strategy to promote open science practices across West and Central Africa, empowering researchers with a reliable digital identity infrastructure. 

ORCID’s GPF is all about boosting global participation, especially in the Global South, and this year, they are investing a total of US $91,500 in projects making a real difference. The ORCID-WACA project stood out in the Community Development & Outreach category due to its ambitious plans to impact how researchers in our region utilise ORCID’s digital infrastructure.

 

Action Steps for ORCID-WACA

Here is what we will be busily doing with our part of the fund:

  1. Training a network of 15 regional ORCID Ambassadors: This team will be our boots on the ground, providing support to individual researchers and institutions
  2. Raising awareness: we have a mapped-out strategy to reach 1000 researchers, librarians, and institutional staff to get them on board.
  3. Building a sustainable community of practice: we have built vibrant networks where people can share knowledge and best practices in a coordinated, impactful manner.
  4. Leveraging eduID.africa: We will leverage eduID.africa, our REN infrastructure to ensure easy, secure login for our community 
  5. Building a Regional Integration Hub: This will be a game-changer, making it super simple for institutions across West and Central Africa to participate in the ORCID ecosystem.

 

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 will align seamlessly with WACREN’s intent for this infrastructure, enabling thousands of researchers to gain global visibility while strengthening the interconnected ecosystem that supports researchers, editors, and journals.

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