Speaker: Williams Nwagwu, CODESRIA Presentation at the Eldis 20th Anniversary event "Learning from 20 years of digital knowledge sharing for global development" held at IDS on Thursday 15 September 2016 and Friday 16 September 2016. A video of this presentation is available at: https://youtu.be/pATTGCPD84k

1. Democratising Access to
Knowledge
CODESRIA AFRICAN OPEN ACCESS PROJECT
Williams E. Nwagwu, PhD
Head, Information and Documentation
Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa
(CODESRIA)
Dakar, Senegal
Department of Information
Studies
University of South Africa
Africa Regional Centre for Information
Science
University of Ibadan, Nigeria
Eldis 20th Anniversary Workshop, University of
Sussex, Brighton, UK
15 September 2016

2. Introduction
CODESRIA in brief
 Facilitate, support and promote production and dissemination of Africa-
centred Africa-focused knowledge
 Adopt innovative strategies to market the knowledge produced in Africa
 Create a stimulated, vibrant and connected African social science
community
“Despite its vast natural and human resources… this continent gets the
rawest real…represented in the production and consumption of
knowledge. So why the raw deal for Africa … ?” (Wa Thiongo 2005).
 Era of national science - setting up of nation states in preference of colonial
rule
 Focus on technology, economic growth, etc – Defragmentation of Africa
 Growth of inequality in knowledge exchanges between Africa and the
developed world
 Onset of serial crises/lack of relevant social science texts; growth in
institutions, mass adoption of higher education

3. Strategies
• Conferences
• Research grants: thematic, national, multinational and
comparative research networks
• Workshops/Seminars/symposia
• Support for theses and dissertation development
• Exchange programs/diaspora

4.  CODESRIA and Knowledge Production and
Dissemination in Africa
 Textbooks distributed free of charge to universities
and research institutes
 12 journals all available through the electronic
media since 2008
 Policy dialogues at different levels
Historically CODESRIA has practices a pseudo form of
open access.

5.  Access to Knowledge – which/what
knowledge? by who? and to where?
 Back to the theme ---
Local knowledge is necessary for
appropriate development (Amin 1987,
Olukoshi 2014, Sall 2015)
“Due to a number of situations that are unfavorable to the production of
knowledge in developing countries, its practice is still disembodied, conducted
from outside, and disconnected from use in public policy” (ADF 2016).
Data generation, analysis , interpretation
and application MUST be executed at
home using home sensitive instruments
an d methodologies
How do we explain the GDP
revisions of Ghana, Kenya, and
Nigeria macroeconomic
indicators.

6.  Appropriate Development is purely ecological –
connected to local realities and geared toward
public policy making.
See:
 Devarajan, S (2011). Africa's Statistical Tragedy World Bank
(http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/africa-s-statistical-tragedy).
 Jerven M (2015). Poor Numbers - How We Are Misled by African
Development Statistics and What to Do about It
(https://www.ids.ac.uk/files/dmfile/a_ids-poornumbers.pdf)
 “Beegle, Kathleen; Christiaensen, Luc; Dabalen, Andrew;
Gaddis, Isis. 2016. Poverty in a Rising Africa. Washington, DC:
World Bank.
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/22575
License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”

7. Utility vs Visibility:
 This knowledge must be defined and
produced locally
 The primary essence of this knowledge
must be to inform, enlighten and educate
 Not production of research papers, not
competition in the number of papers
produced, not targeted at promotion and
tenure, etc. (Nwagwu 2006, 2016).
 Publish abroad or perish at home:
 Circulated where they are needed
(Garfield 1977)

8. Open Access, Open Africa
- Open Access is an Africa-friendly publishing philosophy, an
opportunity for addressing the domestication of African
knowledge;
- Research papers published in scientific journals with at
least one African author more than quadrupled from about
12,500 to over 52,000 with the share of the world’s articles
with African authors almost doubling from 1.2% to around
2.3% (World Bank 2013).
- Africa doubles research output over past decade, moves
towards a knowledge-based economy (Schemm 2013)
- What does this statistics tell us?

9. Open Access in Africa is uneven and
defragmented
 Only 19 (2.47%) open access policies, of the
global 779 (alignment with Horizon 2020 OAP)
 Only one policy by research organisation, 18
by funder
 141 (4.4%) repositories out of global 3215
 123 (8.4%) out of 2715 by research
organisations
(ROARMAP 2016;OPENDOAR 2016).

10. Features of OA in Africa; New
Enclosures
 CODESRIA is concerned with three main
factors
 Science policies in the region
 APCs
 Role of Technology
 Human resources

11.  Science Policies
 Weak regional/national/institutional science
policies, absence of research councils, E.g
Publishing abroad trashes local journals
 Absence of open access policies

12.  Article Processing Charges (APC)
 Only four countries in Africa pay APC
 Scholars in the other countries bear the APC (Xia 2015,
Nwagwu 2015)
 APC is higher than scholars monthly pay (see:Solomon and
Björk 2012)
 Research funding is not available at home
 Research funding is very slim from abroad (Nordling 2012,
2013)
 Stoking fake publishing
- Damaging image of science in Africa (Truth 2012)
- Spurring racism in science (Nwagwu 2015)

13.  The Changing Role Technology
 OA is a technology sprout
 Rapidity of sprout of new technologies
 New technology business models
 Aggregate cost high

14.  Human resources
 Brain drain
 Remuneration patterns
 Skill

15. CODESRIA OA Project
CODESRIA is currently addressing the first
enclosure:
a. Conference on electronic publishing - March 29-April 1
2016: Consensus building leading to
b. The Dakar Declaration on OA 2016 jointly sponsored by
CODESRIA/UNESCO/CLACSO
c. Strategies for marketing and implementing The
Declaration
d. Working Groups/Steering Committees on Open
Publishing in Africa
e. Cross stakeholder linkages, interactions, liaisons,
collaboration opportunities

16. The Strategies…
i. Building consensus among university administrators
and operators, research councils and professional
bodies, regional bodies
ii. CODESRIA African Regional Repository (CoARR)
iii. CODESRIA Open Education Platform (CoOEP)
iii. Codesria African Open Access Journals – hosting
and providing professional publishing services to OA
Publishers in the South

17. Challenges
1. Funding for OA Projects
The current human flow has rerouted funders
interests to address new and emerging refugee
communities
2. Human resources at all levels continue to pose
serious challenges

18. The way forward

19. Trainin
g

20. Technical assistance

21. Concluding Remarks
i. Africa’s needs to take control of its participation
in open access publishing
ii. Africa needs to build open access
infrastructure
iii. These expectation require concerted efforts
and collaboration across boundaries and
stakeholders