Five Perspectives on the State of Open Science in Africa | Katina Magazine

"The West and Central African Research and Education Network (WACREN) has been championing open science and advancing the adoption of open science policies, services, and infrastructures in Africa since 2016 through the LIBSENSE (Abbott, Abduldayan, et al., 2025; Abbott, Cerqueira Pereira de Lemos, et al., 2025) initiative. LIBSENSE has been mobilizing its community to develop infrastructure to support open research in Africa. Through the Diamond Open Access Publishing in Africa project, for example, LIBSENSE provides an open data repository and preprint platform, open publishing and peer review infrastructure, and persistent identifiers. Another initiative, the LIBSENSE-RUFORUM collaboration, is leveraging the expertise of the network to develop an open data repository to upgrade RUFORUM’s current knowledge base. And work is underway to develop shared national repositories across the WACREN region leveraging the capabilities of WEKO3 multitenanted repository infrastructure.

These efforts are not without significant challenges, however, and only represent one aspect of the research ecosystem, i.e., research infrastructures to support open science. At the recently concluded WACREN 2025 conference in Dakar, Senegal, I convened a panel of representatives from across the research ecosystem to discuss Advancing Open Science and Inclusive Knowledge Sharing in Africa. Their perspectives are below, followed by my commentary on key takeaways from their collective experience...."