Guest post: Overview of the African Open Access Landscape, with a Focus on Scholarly Publishing – News Service
peter.suber's bookmarks 2019-10-12
Summary:
"The Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) – during October 2016 until October 2019, conducted a landscape study (Academy of Science of South Africa, 2019) of what is happening on the continent in terms of Open Science and progress made regarding Open Access. This formed part of the pilot African Open Science Platform, in preparation of building an actual platform addressing the collaborative needs experienced by scientists in addressing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
Awareness regarding Open Access is evident through the
- 12 Open Science-related (Open Access/Open Data/Open Science) declarations and agreements endorsed or signed by African governments (Academy of Science of South Africa, 2019);
- 196 Open Access journals from Africa registered on the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ);
- 174 Open Access institutional research repositories registered on OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories);
- 33 Open Access/Open Science policies registered on ROARMAP (Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies);
- 24 data repositories registered with the Registry of Data Repositories (re3data.org) (although the pilot project identified 66 research data repositories);
- and one data repository assigned the CoreTrustSeal. Although this is a start, far more needs to be done to align all African research practices with global standards...."