Resources

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.

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.

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.

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.

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? 

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. […]