Promoting Open Scholarship in Africa: Benefits and Best Library Practices

Raju, Reggie; Adam, Amina; Powell, Crystal

doi:10.1353/lib.2015.0036

Cited by 6 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…From the financial dimension, it was found limited funding opportunities had been found to create and promote OER. [ 52 ] further stated that academicians who create their resources as OER do not receive any awards or citations for their work and also have difficulties in ensuring justice in the digitization, distribution, access, and sustainability of resources. In [ 37 ] it is stated that although the cost of OER applications has decreased, their applicability has not been realized.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are we there yet? A systematic literature review of Open Educational Resources in Africa: A combined content and bibliometric analysis

et al. 2022

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Although several studies have been conducted to summarize the progress of open educational resources (OER) in specific regions, only a limited number of studies summarize OER in Africa. Therefore, this paper presents a systematic literature review to explore trends, themes, and patterns in this emerging area of study, using content and bibliometric analysis. Findings indicated three major strands of OER research in Africa: (1) OER adoption is only limited to specific African countries, calling for more research and collaboration between African countries in this field to ensure educational equity; (2) most of the OER initiatives in Africa have focused on the creation process and neglected other important perspectives, such as dissemination and open educational practices (OEP) using OER; and (3) on top of the typical challenges for OER adoption (e.g., infrastructure), other personal challenges were identified within the African context, including culture, language, and personality. The findings of this study suggest that more initiatives and cross-collaborations with African and non-African countries in the field of OER are needed to facilitate OER adoption in the region. Additionally, it is suggested that researchers and practitioners should consider individual differences, such as language, personality and culture, when promoting and designing OER for different African countries. Finally, the findings can promote social justice by providing insights and future research paths that different stakeholders (e.g., policy makers, educators, practitioners, etc.) should focus on to promote OER in Africa.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are we there yet? A systematic literature review of Open Educational Resources in Africa: A combined content and bibliometric analysis

et al. 2022

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“…Why these differences exist was unfortunately not elucidated through the interviews. It may be that South African scholars, researching at institutions that tend to have fewer resources than those in Canada, more readily understand the value of open access for less developed countries (see Raju, Adam, and Powell, 2015). This is merely a hypothesis, however.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Canadian and South African Scholars’ Use of Institutional Repositories, ResearchGate, and Academia.edu

Swanepoel

Scott

2018

Partnership

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Since their initial development in the early 2000s, institutional repositories (IRs) have proliferated around the globe. Due to low faculty participation, however, content recruitment has often posed a significant challenge for librarians and others promoting their use. Through the last decade, academic social networks (ASNs), such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu, have become popular among scholars as a means to communicate with each other and share their research. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with sixty scholars at six universities in Canada and South Africa to explore their views and practices pertaining to IRs and ASNs. Interviews were transcribed and coded to elucidate trends and themes in the data. The study found that few participants were active supporters of their local IRs. Lack of awareness, time limitations, and concerns regarding copyright remain some of the main obstacles to increased faculty participation. Conversely, more than half of the interviewees were active users of either ResearchGate or Academia.edu. These users valued ASNs both as a means of sharing their work and as tools facilitating connections with their colleagues internationally. Though IRs need not compete with these networks, proponents of open access repositories should be prepared to explain to faculty why they should consider having their research made accessible in a repository though they may already actively share their work through ResearchGate or Academia.edu. Significantly, both ASNs and IRs were more popular among South African than Canadian researchers. It is hoped that the results of the study will be helpful in informing the understanding and decisions of librarians and others working to develop and promote IRs and green open access more broadly.

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“…One good example of the potential transformative effect of digitalization on research processes is the development of open science, a movement towards more collaborative engagement in knowledge creation and dissemination, underpinned to a great extent by digital technologies (Fecher & Friesike, 2014). It has sometimes been positioned as a beneficial development for African scholarship by elevating its status (Raju et al, 2015). Literature on the paucity or presumptive 'failure' of research from sub-Saharan Africa, though, tends to present it from a "country deficit" perspective.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceptions of Rwanda’s Research Environment in the Context of Digitalization: Reflections on Deficit Discourses

Abbott¹,

Cox²

2020

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology

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Digitalization of research processes, like those related to open science, for example, has had mixed outcomes for the visibility of African scholarship. One reason for this may be that ICT-based interventions aimed at improving African research systems presume a country deficit model, that is, a view that Africa's research environment is inherently under-resourced, and failing. Our study set out to explore, through a collaborative rich picture exercise, how research practices are viewed in Rwanda in the light of digitalization by a mixed group of global North and South information specialists. Through an in-depth qualitative inductive analysis of the participants' accounts, we uncovered not only a dominant discourse of "deficit", but also an underlying but hidden counternarrative of resistance to this. We extrapolate how this view could be seen as having the potential for more optimistic outcomes in promoting a more inclusive African research paradigm. We then suggest a research agenda to explore the potential for the digitalization of research processes to provide a means of enabling a dialogue between Western and indigenous forms of knowledge.

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Promoting Open Scholarship in Africa: Benefits and Best Library Practices

Cited by 6 publications

References 26 publications

Are we there yet? A systematic literature review of Open Educational Resources in Africa: A combined content and bibliometric analysis

Are we there yet? A systematic literature review of Open Educational Resources in Africa: A combined content and bibliometric analysis

Canadian and South African Scholars’ Use of Institutional Repositories, ResearchGate, and Academia.edu

Perceptions of Rwanda’s Research Environment in the Context of Digitalization: Reflections on Deficit Discourses

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