News

UbuntuNet Alliance under the AfricaConnect3 project invited 20 librarians to participate in a one-day Open Science training session a day before the UbuntuNet Connect 2023 Conference.

Presentation held at the II DIAMOND OPEN ACCESS CONFERENCE, October 25 - 26, 2023. Toluca, Mexico

To encourage scholarly publishing venues and research institutions to adopt the SDG indicator taxonomy for solution-oriented research output that allows for direct application to societal and environmental interventions to mitigate climate change, forced migration, war and conflict, and other existential crises of our times. 

As part of the IBRO World Congress 2023 (9-13 September - Granada, Spain), the ALBA Network and the IBRO Early Career Committee partnered to facilitate a wide-ranging discussion of what neuroscientists can do as a community to build research capacity in the Global South, and how this increase in local capacities for research and innovation can, in the broader picture, bring benefits to us all.

Presentation held at the OASPA 2023 Conference during the panel Preprints: Supporting Open Peer Review and Global Preprint Adoption Trends. Aurelia Munene and Jo Havemann contributed with an African perspective to this year’s OASPA conference panel: Preprints: Supporting Open Peer Review and Global Preprint Adoption Trends. The slides are available […]

At the #SRI2023 Africa satellite event, Dr Jo Havemann contributed to the Open Science panel that was organised by the African Open Science Platform (AOSP) on June 21, 2023, alongside Dr Ana Persic (UNESCO), Dr Thandi Mgwebi (Research Department at Nelson Mandela University), Dr Erica key (Director, Future Earth), and […]

Translate Science is a working group that wants to exchange information, lobby, and build tools to make translations of scientific articles/reports/books,  abstracts, titles, and terms more accessible and (thus) stimulate the production of such translations. Read more about our work at translatescience.org We recorded this episode in mid-November 2022. Shortly […]

In this conversation, Sara shares with Jo how she committed herself to becoming a happy person and the journey that this led her onto.

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. 

Natira McDermott is a public speaking coach who helps her clients create successful businesses by dropping perfectionism and embracing their own compelling visibility. Despite winning her first high school debate, Natira spent most of her life avoiding an audience. (The irony of her being a public speaking coach is not lost on her.)

Ludmilla Figueiredo is a research data and code curator coming from a background in ecology and conservational biodiversity. In the first episode (part 1), she talks with Jo about the implementation of the open science principles within the fast-paced and heavy workload researchers must handle.In the second episode (part 2), […]

Anna Picco-Schwendener is a Postdoctoral Researcher while Suzanna Marazza is a Legal consultant. They both work at USI Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland. They joined Jo on this podcast to talk about Data and Copyrights protection. To see all episodes, please go to our CONVERSATIONS page. Suzanna Marazza is a collaborator […]

Joy Owango is the executive director of TCC Africa, the Training Center in Communication, based in Kenya and serving the whole continent of Africa. Joy and Jo talk about how the scholarly community is working towards the concept of Global Research Equity – through the lens of Joy’s almost two […]

Zoë Mullan is Editor-in-Chief of the open access journal, The Lancet Global Health. She is an Ex-Officio Board Member of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health; an International Advisory Board member of Sun-Yat Sen Global Health Institute, Guangzhou, China; and a Scientific Advisory Board member of the Centre for International Health Protection at the Robert Koch Institute, Berlin, Germany.

Richard Jefferson is a molecular biologist, social entrepreneur, inventor, open information systems proponent and innovation system strategist. He founded Cambia almost 30 years ago, as a means to democratize science-enabled innovation. He works on "Solving the Problem of Problem Solving"
He discusses his journey into molecular biology, social entrepreneurship and invention with Jo in this podcast.

Hendrik and Jo talk here about how people who obviously struggle with mental health challenges can be approached to make it easy for them to accept the support and develop strategies to recovery.

Erzsebet Toth-Czifra is an open science officer at DARIAH-EU in Berlin, Germany. She has also worked as a content integration manager, external lecturer, and language teacher in Budapest, Hungary. She shares with Jo what Open Science means to her personally and professionally in this podcast.

Farah Hussain is the Managing Director at Farah Hussain Coaching and Training in London, England.
With over 30 years of experience as a coach and trainer, Farah and her organization offer services such as executive coaching, leadership development, diversity & inclusion, corporate training, management consulting, career development coaching and team building.
These services are targeted at individuals and businesses that are seeking to refine their leadership skills.
In this podcast, she shares her experiences as a leadership coach and trainer with Jo.

From manuscript preparation to business-related best practices, scholarly publishers increasingly integrate data capture and analysis into their systems. These efforts are considered essential to enable interoperability, ensure transparency, and build trust with authors, funders, and institutions.

Jo Cowper is the founder of  Six Degrees East, a company she founded out of her passion to help business owners build stronger, more unique and more resilient brands that unlock growth for their businesses. She shares her views on how marketing and branding strategies can help in science communication.

Gareth Dyke shares his wealth of experience on Open access, preprints and scholarly publishing with Jo.

Chris Emezue shares his vision and achievements as the founder of Lanfrica with Jo.
Lanfrica seeks to promote African languages and make their resources discoverable.

Avi Staiman and Jo share some of their experiences and observations made, as well as resources and best practices to foster a global and multilingual research environment.

Kate and Jo talk about unhealthy stress in working and research environments and what measures each of us can take to gain and maintain a state of wellbeing.

Bianca and Jeroen talk with Jo about one of their most recent interactive projects, the Publication Strategy Tool, a tool that helps researchers reconsider their publication strategies by thinking about publishing goals to inform new choices in what, when, how, and where to publish

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!

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.

Nici Pfieffer is Chief Product Officer at the Center for Open Science and in that position works towards enabling researchers to share their work to advance the transparency and reproducibility of science. With Jo, she talks about the importance of open digital infrastructure and how she contributes to research rigor and the achievements made through her work.

A conversation with Marieke Schoenmaker

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

In 2020/21, Huges Abriel took a sabbatical to visit some of his colleagues in francophone Africa. He shares with us his experiences and what led to that journey in the first place.

Wellness consultant Julie Wren talks with Jo about maintaining physical and mental wellbeing despite the impact a high-octane life can have on health and longevity. She is an expert in nutrition, mental wellness, self-care, and draws conclusions from the gut-brain axis to building wellness into your daily routine. We discuss the term 'infobesity' aka information overload and what effects that can have on our wellbeing. Julie also shares tips around building healthy routines through moving, nourishing and resourcing with the 20 minutes rule.

Data scientists and open knowledge evangelist Paola Masuzza shares with Jo what Open Science means to her, and how Open Science and Research Integrity relate to each other. We talk about the influence that the late Jon Tennant had on each of our careers and look at the next steps […]

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.

A conversation with Martin Delahunty

A conversation with Rebecca Kennison, Simone Sacchi, and Chris Long

Following up on our previous episode with Joyce Wangari Nugi, in which we talked about Holistic wellness and mental health in research careers, this episode is about Wangari's work for the deaf community and deafness in academia.
We are joined by N'kadziri Aminah Idd, who facilitates sign language interpretation throughout our conversation (see the video below).

Danny Chan is the President of Biotech Without Borders, a non-profit community biology lab in New York City. Besides trying to defend his time to pursue independent research centered around protocol development for the DIY science community, he enjoys video games, eating new food around the city, watching movies with his partner, and playing table-top RPGs.

Sridhar Gutam is a Senior Plant Physiologist at ICAR, the Indian Institute of Horticultural Research, and also the Convenor at Open Access India. His main area of interests are Plant Physiology, Plant Phenology and Plant Phenotyping as well as Open Access, Open Data, Free and Open Source Software.

Stephanie Gauttier is an Assistant Professor at the Grenoble School of Management (GEM) doing research at the intersection of information systems, human-computer interaction, and ethics. She is the Vice-Chair of the COST Action CA 19117 Researcher Mental Health Observatory and is active in initiatives related to supporting researchers' mental health. For the Marie Curie Alumni Association, Stephanie co-created a peer-to-peer mental health mentoring network.

In today's episode, Jo talks with Abigail Dean about her personal experience from working in the conservation and environmental research field to citizen science projects to web design and social media. Abigail shares her insights about the importance of being able to communicate research and science in a digestible way to the general public that doesn't have a science background.

A conversation with Sarah Nyanchera Nyakeri

A conversation with Lambert Heller

Dr. Mimi Zhou is a conversion copywriter who works with coaches and service providers to unleash the full impact of their words. Clients love that she can swiftly see the missing pieces in their messaging and copy and impeccably fill them in to bring their vision to life. By nailing […]

A conversation with Dasapta Erwin Irawan

A conversation with Donny Winston

A conversation with Mark Hahnel.

Nithaya Chetty is a Professor in theoretical and computational physics and Dean at the Faculty of Science at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, South Africa. In a recent commentary in University World News, Nithaya expressed his concern about the war in Ukraine and emphasized the need for scientific diplomacy and cooperation. In this conversation, Nithaya and Jo talk about the options, opportunities, and difficulties scientific diplomacy provides.

A conversation with Christian Nawroth.

A conversation with Rike Bucher.

A conversation with Nicholas Outa.

Nadja Neumann tells us about her journey from molecular biologist to research advisor and podcast host. With a PhD in Molecular Biology and a strong commitment to scholarly communication and open science, Nadja is keen to find ways to bridge the gap between the research community and other stakeholders to create an open, equitable, and efficient exchange of knowledge. Currently living her passion by working with research support at Karlstad University, Nadja's areas of expertise are strategic publishing, bibliometrics, data management, and sch

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

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 […]

Maureen Archer is President of the training and consulting firm Professional English Inc. and helps professionals (incl. researchers) improve their English skills and confidence for career advancement. With Jo, she talks about the career path that led her to her current profession, common challenges and obstacles with the English language as perceived by non-native English speakers, as well as some of the key skills researchers should have in communicating their ideas, thoughts, and results.

Tatyana Deryugina talks with Jo Havemann about the ongoing war in Ukraine, her outreach to Russian scholars to encourage them to oppose the war and take feasible action, as well as some of the responses she received.

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: …

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.

Julieta Arancio, Alex Kutschera and André Maia Chagas share details about their mentorship program for Open Hardware projects.

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

– Aristotle

Wangari talks about her experience as a professional in mental health, her work at Eider Africa, and the importance of community values for holistic well-being.

"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

Laure shares steps in her career including her contributions to ORCID as founding executive director that led her towards building the Mighty Red Barn consultancy. We explore the purpose and role of [open] scholarship and respectful community building as well as collaboration in engaging with societal challenges.

Access 2 Perspectives now hosts conversations around various topics from Open Science to Science Communication.

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 […]

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.

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.

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.

[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 […]