BioMed Central Blog

Open Access Africa 2011: A brief report

Guest blog by Pablo de Castro, GrandIR, speaker at Open Access Africa 2011

The first Open Access Africa conference, which was held in November 2010 at Jomo Kenyatta University in Nairobi, was originally planned to be a one-time event. However, the enthusiasm and insistent calls by conference attendees to hold further Open Access Africa conference editions resulted in the second Open Access Africa being scheduled from October 25-26 2011 at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, Ghana. The conference, organized by BioMed Central, aimed to bring together researchers, librarians and funding bodies from within and outside of Africa to discuss the benefits of open access publishing in an African context.

The number of attendees at Open Access Africa events keeps increasing; at this year’s event more than 150 representatives from various African countries including Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia and Sudan were in attendance at KNUST to  listen to the talks on different open access-related subjects.

A large number of presentations regarding open access projects and initiatives being presently carried out in Africa were held at the recent event, such as the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) Institutional Repository, launched last May in Addis Ababa (presented by Irene Onyancha, UNECA Chief Librarian), promotion of open access availability of case reports (by Joseph Ana, British Medical Journal West Africa), KNUST open access Institutional Repository (Helena Assamoah-Hassan, KNUST Library) and the OASCIR Project for setting up the first Sudanese Institutional Repository (Pablo de Castro, GrandIR). However, the Open Access Africa 2011 talks had a somewhat wider scope, with presentations such as those by Google Ghana or mPedigree, a successful Ghanaian startup for fighting drug counterfeiting in Africa, going beyond open access into specific technological application initiatives; arising a remarkable interest along the round table held right after the talks.

On day one at the event, Deborah Kahn, Publishing Director at BioMed Central, had offered an overview of open access in developing countries. She showed how connectivity is gradually improving in Africa and how that gives way to other issues such as access to computers and computer skills, research funding, research literature, skills to write research papers and  where to publish research works. The Open Access Africa 2011 conference was a very good opportunity for discussing all these issues, with Mathew Harvey from Department for International Development (DFID) providing the funders' viewpoint, Edanz introducing support programmes for English language research paper editing and Gladys Muhunyo, Director of Computer Aid Kenya, describing their intensive work for supplying low-cost technology to partners in many African countries.

There was also a lively interest from local media to reflect the scientific event being held at KNUST, and interviews with Carrie Calder, BioMed Central Head of Marketing and Digital Sales, were performed as a result at Focus FM and by a local TV station.

There was also an Open Access Africa 2011 poster section, in which initiatives such as EU FP7 Africa Build Project, aiming to build a research and educational infrastructure for Africa, or the Nigerian experience at developing Open Access, by Oluwatoyosi Owoeye from the College of Medicine at University of Lagos, were featured.

Posted by Tara Cronin at 11:32    Comments (0)