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[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 […]

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? 

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

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.

Scientists around the world showed their support to the OA-Africa network and joined the ocean acidification day on June 8, 2017. Ocean acidification is now identified as major threat to marine ecosystems and is one of the SDGs target: “14.3 Minimize and address the impacts of ocean acidification, including through enhanced […]

Originally published in naturejobs. The March for Science turned a spotlight on the importance of research. But it won’t have a lasting effect unless we improve science communication, says Judith Reichel. On Saturday, April 22nd, myself and an estimated 11,000 other science supporters marched in Berlin. The event was part […]

In case you are struggling to name one actual living scientist, here are a few: #actuallivingscientist Tweets !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?’http’:’https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+”://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,”script”,”twitter-wjs”);

This podcast was originally published at PhD Career Stories. If the reader is to grasp what the writer means, the writer must understand what the reader needs. – Judy Swan & George D. Gopen   In episode 15 of PhD Career Stories, Jo Havemann returns for a tips & tricks-themed […]

In his blog Green Tea and Velociraptors, Jon Tennant describes his approach to writing a peer review […] I remember the first time I got a review request in the second year of my PhD. An Editor emails you out of the blue, and asks you to provide your expert commentary on […]

Would you agree that the Digital Age and the Academic Internet are bringing the scientific world closer together? OpenCon is the annual gathering of #OpenAccess, #OpenEducation and #OpenData enthusiasts and gives rise to numerous satellite events across the globe each year, many of which were hosted across the African continent e.g. in Ghana, […]