Dakar Declaration on Open Access Publishing in Africa and the Global South / CODESRIA

"The pattern of knowledge production in the world always suggests that Africa and the rest of the Global South make little contribution to the global knowledge stock. Evidently though, the outflow of knowledge from the developing regions is hampered by the dominant tradition of knowledge valuation and exchange which attributes poor quality and low value to research and other information from these regions. At home, there is obvious low investment in knowledge production and dissemination, poor accessibility and use of local research information as well as low level of consciousness about the social, economic and political potentials of scholarly information.

People from the Global South are responding to this intolerable situation by intensifying their struggles for participation and recognition in the global knowledge space. Evidence of increasing adoption and use of open access publishing model is an essential attestation of the struggle of the people of Africa and the Global South to change the trajectories of knowledge flows.

We, the participants in the Fourth CODESRIA Conference on Electronic Publishing titled Open Access Movement and the Future of Africa’s Knowledge Economy and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), and the Latin American Social Sciences Council (CLACSO), recognising the dare need to raise the global value attached to research information from the Global South, observing the poor access to scholarly outputs from the South and identifying the critical potentials of research information sharing and exchange in the overall wellbeing of our people, are convinced that Open access to scholarly research information is required to redress the historically rooted deficit of Africa and the Global South in the global knowledge domain.

We met in Dakar Senegal during March 29 to April 1 2016 to give Global South accent to the open access movement and set standards that would guide the practice of open access publishing in the regions.

We thus hereby adopt the Dakar Declaration on Open Access Movement Africa and in the Global South on this 1st day of April, 2016.

May this Declaration be a guiding light for scholars/researchers and students, and, policymakers and other stakeholders in the Global South to assert their resolve to undertake research and share their research findings for improved quality of lives...."