Open Access Repositories : What are they and their significance to African Researchers?

 

 Digital Library Services - Library & Information Science Education Network

 

What do you think an open access repository is? According to Queens Mary University of London in London, UK, a digital repository is an online archive for the storage of digital objects; these can range from digital archives, moving or still image galleries, manuscripts, anything that is in electronic format and needs a place to be stored either in the short or longer term.An Open Access Repository on the other hand is a digital repository where the content is freely available to download and reuse (sometimes with restrictions), where no login or subscription is required.

 

Africa is home to several Digital repository. In Ghana, the University of Ghana has an open access repository called the University of Ghana Digital Collections(UGSpace). UGSpace is the institutional repository of the University. It is accessible to everyone around the country, continent and the world. One can find research on Ghanaian and African history dating back to 1469. You can easily create an account on the UGSpace website to publish your work. All research found on UGSpace is free to download for everyone.

 

So, why open access repositories? And how are they significant to the African continent and its researchers and educators? Open access repositories maximize the visibility and impact of African research. African researchers who publish their works in open access repositories open up their research to a worldwide audience. 

 

 Online Catalogue - Library

 

Open access repositories provide a workspace for work-in-progress, and for collaborative or large-scale projects. These repositories offer African researchers a chance to collaborate with other researchers outside their local domain and also work on large scale projects.

 

Publishing research works in an open access repository also helps students with their research as these platforms collect and curate past and present research making it easy for students who are in need of these research data to easily find and use them.

 

There are several benefits of open access digital repositories. Here are some frequently used open access repository softwares where you can browse through registered open access repositories and also create an open access digital repository: Digital Commons, DSpace and EPrints. Other examples include arXiv, bioRxiv, Dryad, Figshare, Open Science Framework.

 

AfricArXiv is an open-access repository for preprints of academic publications which are either about Africa or by African scientists. The platform was established in 2018. It was established to make preprint servers more available in various fields and regions. AfricArXiv is a community partner to Africa Open Science Hardware (AfricaOSH)

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