Research in Africa

AfricArxiv is a community-led digital archive for African research communication. We provide a non-profit platform to upload working papers, preprints, accepted manuscripts (post-prints), presentations, and data sets via our partner platforms. AfricArxiv is dedicated to foster research and collaboration among African scientists, enhance the visibility of African research output and to increase collaboration globally.
Website: info.africarxiv.org

Toward Global Research Equity from an African perspective – A conversation with Joy Owango

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 […]

The Data Quality Imperative – A conversation at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2022

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.

VAD Conference 2022: AfricArXiv Providing Reciprocal Discoverability of African Research Content

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.

Deafness and Academia – A conversation with Wangari Joyce Ngugi

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).

Preprint servers gain prominence, a spotlight on AfricArXiv

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

Podcast: AfricArXiv and TCC Africa Partnership for African Research Visibility

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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, ...

Strengthening academic institutions and research on the African continent.

We work with

  • African scientists and research institutions to enhance their positioning within the global research community
  • Non-African scientists and institutions who wish to collaborate with African partners

Explore this map at kumu.io/a2p/african-digital-research-repositories

Our goal is to identify synergies between African and European research institutions for mutually benefitting collaboration projects.

Highlighting African scientists’ profiles and achievements

We encourage and advise African scientists to build an online presence for their academic achievements.

Supporting global scientific networking

We assist scientists in identifying collaboration partners in Africa.

Collaboration with like-minded organizations

We offer support and consultation on institutional optimization, career building, research equipment, as well as knowledge exchange on a global level.

African Journals OnLine (AJOL) – An online library of peer-reviewed, African-published scholarly journals and works to increase global & continental online access, awareness, quality & use of African-published, peer-reviewed research.

TCC Africa offers trainings in Science Communication across the African continent. TCCs’ mission is to contribute to the increase in profile–locally and internationally–of African science, and its impact on the life of Africans, by improving skills in technical communication in all forms, at academia and other relevant forums, in Africa.

LabHack Zimbabwe

Equipment built in Africa, by African students for African STEM education

LabHacks are fun, competitive and educational events that challenge undergraduate students to make laboratory equipment for STEM education and research.

Instrumental Access Logo

Seeding Labs enables scientists with limited resources to conduct high quality research through their flagship program Instrumental Access. Seeding Labs works with people across the world who care about global health and disease, environmental protection and climate change, agriculture and nutrition, and public health; generating social impact through science. 

AfricaOSH is a gathering for everyone interested in Open Science Hardware as a means to achieve locally adapted, culturally relevant, technologically and economically feasible production in Africa.

TReND in Africa (Teaching and Research in Natural Sciences for Development) is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving university level science education and research in sub-Saharan Africa.

SynTechBio – Biohacker Spaces Network – supports Biohacking and DIY-Bio initiatives in the global south, enhancing the communication and action of the worldwide community as a group. The first African member is KumasiHive from Ghana.
SynTechBio provides information about how to build a complete Biohacking/DIY-Bio Space. Download the manual in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French.

References

Tapfuma MM, Hoskins HR (2019), Open science disrupting the status quo in academic libraries: A perspective of Zimbabwe.The Journal of Academic Librarianship. Volume 45, Issue 4, July 2019, Pages 406-412. DOI: 10.1016/j.acalib.2019.05.005

SA-EU Open Science Dialogue, Hodson, Simon, Walwyn, David, Wood, John, & Wright, Colin. (2019, February 7). SA-EU Open Science Dialogue Report. Zenodo. 10.5281/zenodo.2559469

10.5281/zenodo.1407488

Fonn S (2018), Research-intensive universities in Africa? A model of how to build them. theconversation.com

Participants of African Open Science Platform Strategy Workshop, March 2018 et al (2018), The African Open Science Platform: The Future of Science and the Science of the Future. zenodo.org, 

Glausiusz J (2018), How to deliver sound science in resource-poor regions, nature.com Career Feature

Joubert, M. and Costas, R., 2019. Getting to Know Science Tweeters: A Pilot Analysis of South African Twitter Users Tweeting about Research Articles. Journal of Altmetrics, 2(1), p.2. DOI: doi.org/10.29024/joa.8

Fourie W (2017), Six barriers that make it difficult for African states to use research for policy. theconversation.com

Eisenstein M (2017), Partnering to promote research where it matters. PLoS Negl Trop Dis 11(4): e0005530. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0005530

de Vries J et al. (2017), Regulation of genomic and biobanking research in Africa: a content analysis of ethics guidelines, policies and procedures from 22 African countries. BMC Medical Ethics 18:8 doi.org/10.1186/s12910-016-0165-6

Chinsembu KCet al. (2011), Indigenous knowledge of HIV/AIDS among High School students in Namibia. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 7:17 doi.org/10.1186/1746-4269-7-17

Find more articles at scienceopen.com/collection/Research-in-Africa