News

It is with heavy hearts that we write this post in response to the recent and sudden death of Victor Venema, founder of Translate Science. We extend our heartfelt condolences to his family and friends. Victor was the driving force behind Translate Science — an initiative to facilitate and foster the translation of scientific texts. 

Here is a summary from yesterday's Q&A, in which we discussed Open Access literature discovery, incentives for ECRs to publish Open Access, and making an informed decision about where to publish amongst other topics.

The call for applications for the second cohort of the Open Hardware Makers program is now open!

We are glad to announce that the collaboration between Lanfrica and AfricArxiv has so far led to 239 articles describing African languages. These articles have been successfully included in Lanfrica and can be accessed through lanfrica.com/records?tag=africarxiv

So, Louise Bezuidenhout (t: @LouBezuidenhout) and I were wondering if it would be feasible to encourage NPOs and NGOs to submit their datasets and reports to scholarly repositories for the purpose of data sharing in line with the #FAIRprinciples.

At AfricArXiv, we are proud supporters and endorsers of the ‘Publish Your Reviews’ campaign by ASAPbio.

Translating scholarly works can contribute enormously to a scientific community. Famously, Albert Einstein translated articles into English so that Anglo-Americans could contribute to state-of-the-art science. The modern tendency to ignore scholarship that is not in English leads to lower quality studies and double work. Translation can help overcome linguistic barriers, and is thus an important means to increase accessibility and participation as well as to counteract fragmentation of the literature into linguistic islands.

AfricArXiv was represented at the VAD conference 2022 in Freiburg, Germany, organized by the Africa Centre for Transregional Research (ACT) conference focused on the theme of African Europe, reciprocal perspectives and it addressed processes of co-production of knowledge as well as the mutual questioning of different ways. of thinking.

Join the Access 2 Perspectives community to exchange best practices in Open Science Communication. This program is FREE of charge for researchers affected by the war in Ukraine. At Access 2 Perspectives, we are committed to global research equity. The foundations of our work as scholars, entrepreneurs, and researchers are […]

"Hardware is a vital part of experiments process and advances in instrumentation have been central to scientific revolutions by expanding observations beyond standard human senses." But making hardware and especially sharing hardware is neither an easy nor a recognized task in academia. In order to tackle this issue, some of us started a Research Data Alliance (RDA) interest group.

This collective preprint is an active document intended to encourage reflection on academic writing. It is meant to evolve as a result of continuous input from interested contributors. Everyone is welcome who wants to contribute.

Talking about preprints and AfricArXiv in particular, we are honored to be featured in University World News along with colleagues and institutional partners Joy Owango (TCC Africa-Training Centre in Communication), Stephanie Dawson (ScienceOpen), Mark Hahnel (Figshare), Catherine Ahearn (Knowledge Futur

The Budapest Open Access Initiative is celebrating its 20th anniversary and is marking this occasion by releasing four major recommendations, informed by community input, to guide #openaccess in the next 10 years.

In October 2021, AfricArXiv, the African Open Access Portal, announced a partnership with the Training Centre in Communication TCC Africa to build and manage an international scholarly community that will enrich the visibility of African research. Joy Owango from TCC Africa and Dr. Johanna Havemann from AfricArXiv share in-depth about […]

The ReMO COST Action stands in solidarity with the people of Ukraine. We add our voices to the joint declaration of Eurodoc and the Marie Curie Alumni Association and strongly condemn the Russian Federation’s acts of violence and aggression against the people of Ukraine. We also concur with the COST Association’s call for international efforts to help ensure the safety of Ukrainian researchers and innovators.

Let us support the opposition in Russia by maintaining ties with Russian colleagues in Research and Cultural professional contexts and intl collaboration.
Please read the Engl Translation of Elena Stein's post: …

The website #ScienceForUkraine serves as a platform to support Ukrainian researchers with accommodation, research hosting, and funding. How you can help If you hear about dedicated positions with short-term availability dedicated to Ukrainian researchers on Twitter, please retweet using the hashtag #ScienceForUkraine If you are the coordinator of a national/disciplin-specific […]

We, Russian scientists and scientific journalists, declare a strong protest against the hostilities launched by the armed forces of our country on the territory of Ukraine. This fatal step leads to huge human losses and undermines the foundations of the established system of international security. The responsibility for unleashing a new war in Europe lies entirely with Russia.

"By 'life' we mean a thing that can nourish itself and grow and decay."

– Aristotle

Rethink your publishing strategy. Instead of making it all about numbers and prestige (High Impact factor and Journal, find answers to the questions of Why, What, When, and How to make your research results available and based on that decide Where to publish.

"You cannot protect the environment unless you empower people, you inform them, and you help them understand that these resources are their own, that they must protect them."
– Wangari Maathai

"An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer."

– Max Planck

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie

Owango, Joy, Munene, Aurelia, Ngugi, Wangari Joyce, Obanda, Johanssen, Havemann, Johanna, Saderi, Daniela, & Korzec, Kornelia. (2021, December 9). Open Reviewers Africa – A workshop to empower the next generation of African Peer Reviewers. FORCE2021: Joining Forces to Advance the Future of Research Communications. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5770712

The Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa), based at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, and the pan-African Open Access portal AfricArXiv herewith announce our formal collaboration agreement with the objective of creating a long-term strategic and sustainable approach to building and managing an international scholarly community that will enrich the […]

Munene, Aurelia, Ngugi, Wangari Joyce, Owango, Joy, Obanda, Johanssen, Havemann, Johanna, Saderi, Daniela, & Korzec, Kornelia. (2021). Open Reviewers Africa. FORCE2021: Joining Forces to Advance the Future of Research Communications. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5762096

Heads of states and various stakeholders have convened at COP26 to formulate solutions to the impacts of climate change. Addressing these enormous challenges requires access to scientific research, including that conducted by environmental non-government organizations (eNGOs).

Digital tools that support open science practices play a key role in the seamless accumulation, archiving and dissemination of scholarly data, outcomes and conclusions. Despite their integration into open science practices, the providence and design of these digital tools are rarely explicitly scrutinized.

Havemann, Jo. (2021). Research Capacity - Reality, Equality, Equity. FORCE2021: Joining Forces to Advance the Future of Research Communications (FORCE2021). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5736934

Here are a few quick search results in counter-chronological order for “illegal pharmaceuticals" (example search). Be aware that each platform works with a specific search approach and algorithm which is why we recommend for you to always compare and screen search results on more than one or two platforms:

The Open Science Pie visualizes eight (8) important pieces of Open Science that can easily be implemented by any researcher to foster transparent, reproducible, and efficient research practices.

Our team member Rima Maria Rahal was invited by Rebecca Johnson and Rachel Taylor from Glasgow ReproducibiliTea, watch here the recording of her presentation. ‘Science in Crisis? Open Science as a Reform Movement’ Open Science has become a buzzword for recent meta-scientific developments, which are beginning to change what is […]

Open Science is a concept promoting transparency, reproducibility, equity, and fairness in knowledge acquisition and dissemination for ecologically sustainable livelihood of a global society in accordance with Good Scientific Practice (GSP) by utilizing digital tools and services.

It's been a deeply memorable experience to be interviewed by Ghazali Ohorella, the host of the Gomaluku Podcast and the thought leadership show #HotToIndigenousNOW where he provides a safe space and uplifting platform for indigenous mentors and leaders from around the world.

Journals that publish Open Source Hardware designs have different requirements for the documentation that goes together with the paper being published.

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are a game-changer for education, for a plethora of reasons spanning aspects such as accessibility and dissemination. Here, I want to focus on the promise of OERs to facilitate updating educational materials.

Under the title Encouraging Preprint Curation and Review, ASAPbio has held a design sprint to increase exposure for new and existing ideas for encouraging preprint curation and review. The event was held in collaboration with Wellcome, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, DORA, EMBO Press, PLOS, and eLife. […]

Aravinth Panch, A2P team member and co-founder of DreamSpace Academy in Batticaloa, helped Sri Lanka Institute of Nanotechnology (SLINTEC) Colombo to develop a rapid test kit for COVID-19 as reported in newspapers in Sri Lanka.

Imagine: from your taxpayer's money, you pay for the highways in your country. And then imagine a company would come along, put up a toll gate and charge you so much money that only the richest cars could afford to use this highway. We would never allow this to happen on our roads, would we? But then why are we allowing this to happen to our scientific knowledge?

Pivot Global Education was commissioned by the Universities South Africa’s Entrepreneurship Development in Higher Education along with the Department of Higher Education and Training (South Africa) to assess and map the development of entrepreneurship throughout the country’s public universities by evaluating structures, supports, delivery and successes in entrepreneurship development.

During the current SARS-COV-2 pandemic, the scientific approach is ostensibly unable to keep up with the rapid pace at which the crisis is spreading. After developing a research idea, it usually takes years to publish the results. Now, however, things need to move faster. One more reason to embrace open […]

[originally published at zbw-mediatalk.eu] Due to precautionary measures in regard to the coronavirus, the second day of this year’s Open Science Conference got canceled. Luckily, the panellists Johanna Havemann, Anne-Floor Scholvinck, Daniel Spichtinger and August Wierling agreed to submit their opening statements as a blog post for ZBW MediaTalk. by […]

[originally published at opensciencemooc.eu] We are deeply saddened by the sudden death of our colleague Dr Jonathan (Jon) Tennant. Jon was a visionary, deeply committed to making science accessible to everyone. For years, he worked tirelessly to make the world understand the urgency of the issues, writing prolifically and sharing […]

University and research institute labs around the world have repurposed their inventory and skills set to produce self-made sanitizers. Here are two examples, from Nigeria and Sweden: Download the WHO Guide to local production of handrub formulations: who.int/gpsc/5may/Guide_to_Local_Production.pdf

With the current coronavirus pandemic, the urgent need for Open Access to research results will increase scientific public domain knowledge to COVID-19 related literature hence enabling African researchers to develop African-centered solutions towards combating the SARS-CoV 2 virus, while at the same time strengthening the local biomedical resources of African countries and increasing their preparedness for future outbreaks. This applies to both global and regional levels. Previous virus outbreaks, such as the recent Western African Ebola and Zika epidemics, ...

The International African Institute (IAI, https://www.internationalafricaninstitute.org) in collaboration with AfricarXiv (https://info.africarxiv.org) present an interactive map of African digital research literature repositories. This drew from IAI’s earlier work from 2016 onwards to identify and list Africa-based institutional repositories that focused  on identifying repositories based in African university libraries. Our earlier resources are available at https://www.internationalafricaninstitute.org/repositories.

There is a lot of information circulating about COVID-19 – some more reliable than others. For many individuals, it is stressful to sort through differing messages – often in languages that are not their mother-tongue. We propose to address this with short, consistent messages provided in as many regional/local languages […]

COVID-19 relevant information and resources by country License: CC-0 Click on individual nodes and view information by country info hotlines governmental informational websites, Twitter feeds & Facebook pages fact checking online resources language indicator DIY resources clinical staff capacity building etc. With the navigation buttons to the right, you can […]

Maia Chagas, A.; Molloy, J.; Prieto Godino, L.; Baden, T. Leveraging Open Hardware to Alleviate the Burden of COVID-19 on Global Health Systems. Preprints2020, 2020030362 (doi: 10.20944/preprints202003.0362.v1). Abstract With the current rapid spread of COVID-19, global health systems are increasingly overburdened by the sheer number of people that need diagnosis, […]

Scientists often run three or more highly complex projects in parallel. On top of that, a growing number of publishers and funding agencies require scientists to make their raw data available upon publication according to the four foundational principles – Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability (FAIR). To ensure goal-oriented and […]

What do you think are integral parts of research integrity? What topics are entailed and should be discussed in all or some research disciplines to what detail and with what specific aspects? >> board.net/p/A2P_Research_Integrity List of topics to discuss: Responsible Research & Innovation Animal Welfare Citations Hedging Ethics in Science Legal […]

We are inviting you for a virtual collaborative writing sprint around Scholarly Communication and soft skills development for researchers. Agenda: board.net/p/A2P_COVID19-Quarantine_OpenScience-sprint Facilitated by Access 2 Perspectives team membersTopics: access2perspectives.com/topics/Contact: info@access2perspectives.org (Jo Havemann)Licensing: CC-BY 4.0 Access 2 Perspectives // see Procedure Under each topic of the day (e.g. day 1: Open […]

Refer to the Wikipedia article 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic or the World Health Organization’s situation reports for most recent reported case information. Protect yourself and others from infection by following these suggestions: Handwashing Respiratory hygiene Self-isolation and self-quarantine Social distancing Contribute to vaccine research (see below) Stay calm and wash your hands. In between, check […]

AfricArxiv is a free, open source and community-led digital archive for African research output in the form of a non-profit open source platform for African scientists to upload their working papers, pre-prints, accepted manuscripts (post-prints), and published papers as well as associated data packages and article versioning. AfricArxiv is dedicated to enhance and open up research and collaboration among African scientists and non-African scientists that work on African topics.

I worry that ‘I don’t know what I don’t know. That is the situation of many students when faced with research data management issues. After years of practice in the neuroscience data analysis and 6 months dealing purely with Research Data Management (RDM) in that domain, I am sometimes still […]

The following interview was originally published at zbw-mediatalk.eu and licensed under Creative Commons BY 4.0. Enjoy the read! Fostering transparency, open access and global dialogue in research are crucial to deal with local as well as with global challenges like the ongoing climate change. Practiced open science allows for more […]

The first webinar of the Open Science MOOC focused on Module 5: Open Research Software and Open Source and was pesented by our team colleague André Maia Chagas.   View the slides of this presentation at zenodo.org/record/3242340 Cite as: Maia Chagas, Andre. (2019, June). Bringing science to the 21st Century: Open […]

A couple of days ago on May 15th in Leipzig, Germany at the Mx Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA), Corina Logan had invited Denis Bourguet and Thomas Guillemaud from Peer Community In to give a seminar on their non-profit service to science: A researcher-run solution to improving science and […]

Since Open Science has become a recurring buzzword for recent meta-scientific developments, this article summarizes what these developments entail. What are the reasons for discussions about Open Access, Open Data and Open Peer Review? Which technological changes can we expect and which impact will they have on society and the research community? 

As Open Data and the F.A.I.R. Principles are more and more becoming a standard in scientific processes, transparency and reproducibility of the whole research workflow are starting to be recognized as good scientific practices (see for instance the SPARC initiative openscholarchampions.eu). To make the transition towards Open Data and the […]

The changing world of scholarly communication and the emerging new wave of ‘Open Science’ or ‘Open Research’ has brought to light a number of controversial and hotly debated topics. […]

Havemann, Johanna. (2019, February). A Case for Open Science Hardware. Zenodo. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2564076

Disclaimer as of Nov 15, 2019: Official announcement from the Open Science MOOC Steering Committee – Introducing the Open Science MOOC by Jon Tennant. This article was originally published on genr.eu | DOI: 10.25815/6hyr-g583 The world of research is not working as well as it could be. On all sides […]

This article was originally published at ese-bookshelf.blogspot.com by our colleague Duncan Nicholas. After more than a year of work, the Open Scholarship Strategy document has been published in full. The work was inspired by the Foundations for OER Strategy Development, the FORCE11 Scholarly Commons Working Group, and developed by an open […]

Justin Ahinon and Jo Havemann, both founders of AfricArXiv, talk in this article about the development of Open Science Services in Africa, initiatives, the current situation and chances in the future. This article was originally published at elephantinthelab.org (doi:10.5281/zenodo.1492745) Open Science is becoming increasingly popular globally and provides unprecedented opportunities […]

In an attempt to secure and protect unbiased Open Science in Europe our team member, palaeontologist and Open Access activist Jon Tennant has taken another stand against Elsevier. Elsevier is the biggest and most influential scientific publisher and at the same time probably the most profitable business worldwide. To get an overview […]

An article by Nick Wehner, Director of Open Initiatives at OCTO | Open Communications for The Ocean – originally published at marxivinfo.org. Numerous studies have found that Open Access papers are cited significantly more than the global average. Across all scientific disciplines, the average citation increase is 30%. If that’s not a compelling enough […]

Towards the end of September, the Open Science Fellows Program  will enter its third round at Wikimedia Germany. Once again, 20 scientists will be supported in making their scientific research and teaching open and thereby contributing to the promotion of Open Science. An integral part of the program is the mentoring […]

At this year’s re:publica, we had a session on Open Science Hardware. Our focus was on hardware and software solutions, tools and services, resources and projects that adopt the Open Source approach and have one goal: to increase access to scientific research. Initiatives and visionaries around the globe are putting this […]

Introducing our new course on Policy Writing and Communication for Scientists, Alexandra Athansopoulous-Köpping shares her views on the importance of the topic and its relevance to research.   In the last season of Game of Thrones when the danger of the white walkers was more imminent than ever, esp. in […]

This post was originally published in Swedish at the Vetenskap & Allmänhet website. “VA is an independent Swedish non-profit membership organization that works to promote dialogue and openness between researchers and the public.” This English version was originally published by Olle Bergman on LInkedIn. I harp on about it all the time, […]

On his blog Green Tea and Velociraptors our team colleague Jon Tennant questions the ethics of the widely practiced copyright transfer from authors of peer reviewed articles that are based mostly on public funding to commercial publishers.  The following is an excerpt from Jon’s original blog post. […] Typically, the process of […]

Tim Blais is the creative everything at A Capella Science and has a Master’s degree in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. In the Scientific American blog Joanne Manaster suggested his project “may be the single most comprehensively nerdy endeavour ever conceived.” In a McGill Daily interview […]

The infographic shows how to achieve 100% Open Access for free and legally; available on figshare.

For a 2-day course on Good Manufacturing Practice earlier this week, I prepared the following presentation. The lecture started with a recap of Good Scientific Practice, followed by Good Laboratory Practice as prerequisites for reliable and transparent manufacturing in pharmaceutical, medicinal, food and agricultural industries. Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) 2day course from […]

Our institutional partner TCC Africa offers trainings in Science Communication across the African continent, course topics ranging from proposal writing to resource mobilisation, data analysis and communicating to non-scientists. Two participants from a recent BHEARD training share their lessons learned:   Mukamurezi Godelieve is a graduate student at Nairobi University with a […]

In a recent SciDevNet article, Ochieng’ Ogodo reported on the discussion outcomes from this year’s Regional Conference on Balanced and Inclusive Education (BIE) aimed to offer suggestions for addressing Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 (Education). The meeting was hosted in Lagos in July 2017 by the Nigerian Academy of Science (NAS) in collaboration with the […]

This podcast was originally published at PhD Career Stories. Professor Alfred Orina Isaac is a Pharmaceutical Scientist at Kenya Technical University with a specific interest in Neuroscience. His research is focused on neurotoxicology and neuroprotection mechanisms in the brain. Currently, he is studying the neurotoxicity of Khat in a mouse model and […]

  In April this year, the following 10 changemakers gathered at Ruhr University for TEDxRuhrUniversityBochum:   (1) Ganesh Muren presenting his social enterprise Saora Insustries, which delivers a solution for sustainable, affordable and environment-friendly drinking water. (2) Jakob Schoen had a vision of a volunteer maritime salvage back in 2015, when he heard about […]

Researchers give papers for free (and often actually pay) to exploitative publishers who make millions off of our articles by locking them behind paywalls. This discriminates not only against the public (who are usually the ones that paid for the research in the first place), but also against the academics from institutions that cannot afford to pay for journal subscriptions and the ‘scholarly poor’. I explain exploitative and ethical publishing practices, highlighting choices researchers can make right now to stop exploiting ourselves and discriminating against others.