News

Open Hardware Makers – A conversation with Julieta Arancio, Alex Kutschera, and André Maia Chagas

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

Aristotle: By ‘life’ we mean …

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

– Aristotle

Holistic wellness and mental health in research careers – A conversation with Wangari Joyce Ngugi

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.

Wangari Maathai: Protect the environment

"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

Max Planck: An experiment is …

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

– Max Planck

Building communities and collaborations using socio-technical systems – A conversation with Laure Haak

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.

Join our conversations!

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

Marie Cure: Now is the time

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie

Open Reviewers Africa (presentation)

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

New Dawn for African Researchers as TCC Africa and AfricArXiv Announce Formal Collaboration

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 […]

Open Science Pie

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 (Definition)

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.

Survey: Certification for open source hardware designs under peer-review

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

Open Education Mirrors the Open Science Reform Movement

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.

TCC Africa & AfricArXiv win at ASAPbio sprint

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. […]

Low-cost Loop Mediated Isothermal Amplification (LAMP) kit to enhance COVID testing capacity in Sri Lanka

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.

Kamila Markram: Open Science can save the planet

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?

National University Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Baseline Study

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.

Perspectives on Open Science and Inequity: Who is left behind?

[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 […]

In memoriam of Jon Tennant

[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 […]

Day 18: DIY sanitizer

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

Harnessing the Open Science infrastructure for an efficient African response to COVID-19 [preprint]

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, ...

African Digital Research Repositories: Mapping the Landscape

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.

Day 11: Multilingual COVID-19 Information Videos

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 […]

Day 10: Mapping the COVID-19 global response

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 […]

Day 8: Leveraging Open Hardware to Alleviate the Burden of COVID-19 on Global Health Systems

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, […]

Day 3: Project Management

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 […]

Day 2: Research Integrity

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 […]

COVID-19 Research & Outbreak Mitigation

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 […]

Open Science Online Training package for African scientists

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.

Education Needs in Research Data Management

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 […]

ZBW Mediatalk interview about AfricArXiv and language diversity in Science

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 […]

Open Source software and tools for better research

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 […]

Community driven peer review for preprints

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 […]

Science in Crisis – Is Open Science the Solution?

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? 

A Case for Open Science Hardware

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

Open Science in Africa – Challenges, Opportunities and Perspectives

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 […]

re:publica 18 session – Towards Lab Equipment as a Common Good

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 […]

The ethics of copyright transfer for scientific research

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 […]

A Capella Science

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 […]

TCC Africa training experience BHEARD

TCC Africa training experience

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 […]

Moving forward: Research in Africa

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 […]

Brain research in Kenya

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 […]

Corina Logan: “We can shift academic culture through publishing choices”

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.

Ocean Acidification Africa

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 […]

Why I marched for science – a transatlantic perspective

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 […]

Trending now on Twitter: Actual Living Scientist(s)

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”);

When writing about research mind your audience

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 […]

Don’t be afraid of writing a peer review

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 […]

From #OpenConBerlin 2016 to Africa

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, […]