Challenges of building digital repositories in Africa: A case study of best practise

Creating the sustainable means to safeguard and make the African scientific memory evolutive for future generations make challenges regarding preservation and knowledge sharing most acute. Then, many initiatives have been developed to generate synergies at a national and regional level in order to raise awareness in the urgent need to implement policies and programs to safeguard and valorize the rich African historical, scholarly and cultural heritage. But, despite resolutions and recommendations outlining road maps to root out the continent from isolation regarding the internationally networked system of knowledge production and sharing, there are now few relevant African contents freely accessible. And this, in spite of the existing potential and huge progress made in ICT outputs. In the general African context, with limited economic resources, one can therefore understand why such challenges are of urgent pressure. 1 - Challenges attached to the preservation and valorization of African scholarly contents. 2 - Presenting a case study of best practice: the digital repository of IFAN Ch A Diop

A literature review of the use of Web 2.0 tools in Higher Education

This review focuses on the use of Web 2.0 tools in Higher Education. It provides a synthesis of the research literature in the field and a series of illustrative examples of how these tools are being used in learning and teaching. It draws out the perceived benefits that these new technologies appear to offer, and highlights some of the challenges and issues surrounding their use. The review forms the basis for a HE Academy funded project, ‘Peals in the Cloud’, which is exploring how Web 2.0 tools can be used to support evidence-based practices in learning and teaching. The project has also produced two in-depth case studies, which are reported elsewhere (Galley et al., 2010, Alevizou et al., 2010). The case studies focus on evaluation of a recently developed site for learning and teaching, Cloudworks, which harnesses Web 2.0 functionality to facilitate the sharing and discussion of educational practice. The case studies aim to explore to what extent the Web 2.0 affordances of the site are successfully promoting the sharing of ideas, as well as scholarly reflections, on learning and teaching

Open Access eXchange (OAeX): an economic model and platform for fundraising open scholarship services

This article describes the Open Access eXchange (OAeX) project, a pragmatic and comprehensive economic model and fundraising platform for open scholarship initiatives. OAeX connects bidders with funders at scale and right across the open scholarship spectrum through crowdfunding: financial expenditure is regulated by a market of freely competing providers and financial transactions and transparency are assured by a clearing-house entity. Specifically, OAeX seeks to facilitate open access publishing without the barrier of article processing charges (APCs), as well as contribute to solving challenges of transparency and economic sustainability in open scholarship projects in the broader sense

Development informatics research and the challenges in representing the voice of developing country researchers: A South African view

Indigenous or local researchers from developing countries have not made a leading contribution to development informatics (DI) or information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) research. This is noteworthy since these researchers should be in a prominent position to contribute to the discourse, where context knowledge is regarded as vital. Furthermore, a dependence on foreign scholarly direction can create a gap between research and reality in a way that affects the success of ICT programmes in African countries. Extant literature highlights this problem, but most studies stop short of considering the causes and proposing how to amplify the voice of developing country researchers. This paper documents the ICT4D/DI research discourse that took place during four seminal academic events in South Africa during the period 2012 to 2015. Those discussions are presented and analysed here to contribute to the wider discourse on ICT research and practice in developing countries, with the aim of enhancing the research contribution of developing countries. An interpretivist, involved researcher analysis of the workshop reports is conducted to gain an improved understanding of the South African ICT4D/DI researcher’s challenges to proportional participation. While this study takes a South African perspective, many of the findings could apply to researchers in other developing countries.CA2016www.wits.ac.za/linkcentre/aji

Participation in the global knowledge commons : challenges and opportunities for research dissemination in developing countries

Due to improving Internet connectivity and a growing number of international initiatives, knowledge workers in developing countries are now getting access to scholarly and scientific publications and electronic resources at a level that is unmatched historically. This is highly significant, particularly in areas of medicine, agricultural and environmental sciences, and development literature that are much needed if developing countries are to meet the Millennium Development Goals. At the same time, the Open Access movement and the growing number of Open Archive Initiative (OAI) compliant institutional repositories promise to provide even greater access to resources and scientific publications that were previously inaccessible. These low cost technology and interoperability standards are also providing great opportunities for libraries and publishers in developing countries to disseminate local research and knowledge and to bridge the South-North knowledge gap. This article reviews these recent trends, discusses their significance for information access in developing countries, and provides recommendations for knowledge workers on how to actively participate in and contribute to the global knowledge commons

If you build it, will they come? How researchers perceive and use web 2.0

Over the past 15 years, the web has transformed the way we seek and use information. In the last 5 years in particular a set of innovative techniques – collectively termed ‘web 2.0’ – have enabled people to become producers as well as consumers of information. It has been suggested that these relatively easy-to-use tools, and the behaviours which underpin their use, have enormous potential for scholarly researchers, enabling them to communicate their research and its findings more rapidly, broadly and effectively than ever before. This report is based on a study commissioned by the Research Information Network to investigate whether such aspirations are being realised. It seeks to improve our currently limited understanding of whether, and if so how, researchers are making use of various web 2.0 tools in the course of their work, the factors that encourage or inhibit adoption, and researchers’ attitudes towards web 2.0 and other forms of communication. Context: How researchers communicate their work and their findings varies in different subjects or disciplines, and in different institutional settings. Such differences have a strong influence on how researchers approach the adoption – or not – of new information and communications technologies. It is also important to stress that ‘web 2.0’ encompasses a wide range of interactions between technologies and social practices which allow web users to generate, repurpose and share content with each other. We focus in this study on a range of generic tools – wikis, blogs and some social networking systems – as well as those designed specifically by and for people within the scholarly community. Method: Our study was designed not only to capture current attitudes and patterns of adoption but also to identify researchers’ needs and aspirations, and problems that they encounter. We began with an online survey, which collected information about researchers’ information gathering and dissemination habits and their attitudes towards web 2.0. This was followed by in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a stratified sample of survey respondents to explore in more depth their experience of web 2.0, including perceived barriers as well as drivers to adoption. Finally, we undertook five case studies of web 2.0 services to investigate their development and adoption across different communities and business models. Key findings: Our study indicates that a majority of researchers are making at least occasional use of one or more web 2.0 tools or services for purposes related to their research: for communicating their work; for developing and sustaining networks and collaborations; or for finding out about what others are doing. But frequent or intensive use is rare, and some researchers regard blogs, wikis and other novel forms of communication as a waste of time or even dangerous. In deciding if they will make web 2.0 tools and services part of their everyday practice, the key questions for researchers are the benefits they may secure from doing so, and how it fits with their use of established services. Researchers who use web 2.0 tools and services do not see them as comparable to or substitutes for other channels and means of communication, but as having their own distinctive role for specific purposes and at particular stages of research. And frequent use of one kind of tool does not imply frequent use of others as well

Liable, but Not in Control? Ensuring Meaningful Human Agency in Automated Decision-Making Systems

Automated decision making is becoming the norm across large parts of society, which raises interesting liability challenges when human control over technical systems becomes increasingly limited. This article defines "quasi-automation" as inclusion of humans as a basic rubber-stamping mechanism in an otherwise completely automated decision-making system. Three cases of quasi- automation are examined, where human agency in decision making is currently debatable: self- driving cars, border searches based on passenger name records, and content moderation on social media. While there are specific regulatory mechanisms for purely automated decision making, these regulatory mechanisms do not apply if human beings are (rubber-stamping) automated decisions. More broadly, most regulatory mechanisms follow a pattern of binary liability in attempting to regulate human or machine agency, rather than looking to regulate both. This results in regulatory gray areas where the regulatory mechanisms do not apply, harming human rights by preventing meaningful liability for socio-technical decision making. The article concludes by proposing criteria to ensure meaningful agency when humans are included in automated decision-making systems, and relates this to the ongoing debate on enabling human rights in Internet infrastructure

The Value of New Scientific Communication Models for Chemistry

This paper is intended as a starting point for discussion on the possible future of scientific communication in chemistry, the value of new models of scientific communication enabled by web based technologies, and the necessary future steps to achieve the benefits of those new models. It is informed by a NSF sponsored workshop that was held on October 23-24, 2008 in Washington D.C. It provides an overview on the chemical communication system in chemistry and describes efforts to enhance scientific communication by introducing new web-based models of scientific communication. It observes that such innovations are still embryonic and have not yet found broad adoption and acceptance by the chemical community. The paper proceeds to analyze the reasons for this by identifying specific characteristics of the chemistry domain that relate to its research practices and socio-economic organization. It hypothesizes how these may influence communication practices, and produce resistance to changes of the current system similar to those that have been successfully deployed in other sciences and which have been proposed by pioneers within chemistry.National Science Foundation, Microsof

Discipline-specific open access publishing practices and barriers to change: an evidence-based review (version 2)

Background: Many of the discussions surrounding Open Access (OA) revolve around how it affects publishing practices across different academic disciplines. It was a long-held view that it would be only a matter of time before all disciplines fully and relatively homogeneously implemented OA. Recent large-scale bibliometric studies show, however, that the uptake of OA differs substantially across disciplines. We aimed to answer two questions: First, how do different disciplines adopt and shape OA publishing practices? Second, what discipline-specific barriers to and potentials for OA can be identified? Methods: In a first step, we identified and synthesized relevant bibliometric studies that assessed OA prevalence and publishing patterns across disciplines. In a second step, and adopting a social shaping of technology perspective, we studied evidence on the socio-technical forces that shape OA publishing practices. We examined a variety of data sources, including, but not limited to, publisher policies and guidelines, OA mandates and policies and author surveys. Results: Over the last three decades, scholarly publishing has experienced a shift from “closed” access to OA as the proportion of scholarly literature that is openly accessible has increased continuously. Estimated OA levels for publication years after 2010 varied between 29.4% and 66%. The shift towards OA is uneven across disciplines in two respects: first, the growth of OA has been uneven across disciplines, which manifests itself in varying OA prevalence levels. Second, disciplines use different OA publishing channels to make research outputs OA. Conclusions: We conclude that historically rooted publishing practices differ in terms of their compatibility with OA, which is the reason why OA can be assumed to be a natural continuation of publishing cultures in some disciplines, whereas in other disciplines, the implementation of OA faces major barriers and would require a change of research culture. Keyword