In this roundtable, representatives from across the African research ecosystem share their views on opportunities and challenges for open science on the continent. Available in English and French.
Infrastructural challenges, ranging from limited and costly broadband connectivity to unreliable electricity, are widely seen to inhibit scholarly progress in African research and education institutions. The problem is more acute in sub-Saharan Africa, which is still dealing with a postcolonial legacy of institutional voids and structural challenges (Young, 2012). These problems make it difficult for scholarship to flourish, since it needs to be part of an ecosystem that works. When African research systems are discussed in the literature, we often see statements like “Africa accounts for only 3 percent of global scientific output” or “Africa lacks the strong institutions necessary for functioning research systems to thrive.”
Open science could help change the status quo. By creating the opportunity for scholars to engage in open and collaborative research, open science could offer a decolonized approach to building a vibrant research ecosystem.
The West and Central African Research and Education Network (WACREN) has been championing open science and advancing the adoption of open science policies, services, and infrastructures in Africa since 2016 through the LIBSENSE (Abbott, Abduldayan, et al., 2025; Abbott, Cerqueira Pereira de Lemos, et al., 2025) initiative. LIBSENSE has been mobilizing its community to develop infrastructure to support open research in Africa. Through the Diamond Open Access Publishing in Africa project, for example, LIBSENSE provides an open data repository and preprint platform, open publishing and peer review infrastructure, and persistent identifiers. Another initiative, the LIBSENSE-RUFORUM collaboration, is leveraging the expertise of the network to develop an open data repository to upgrade RUFORUM’s current knowledge base. And work is underway to develop shared national repositories across the WACREN region leveraging the capabilities of WEKO3 multitenanted repository infrastructure.
These efforts are not without significant challenges, however, and only represent one aspect of the research ecosystem, i.e., research infrastructures to support open science. At the recently concluded WACREN 2025 conference in Dakar, Senegal, I convened a panel of representatives from across the research ecosystem to discuss Advancing Open Science and Inclusive Knowledge Sharing in Africa. Their perspectives are below, followed by my commentary on key takeaways from their collective experience.
Sokona Dagnoko, Head, RUFORUM Partnerships
Africa is not yet on track to achieve the key aspirations—reducing hunger and poverty—emphasised in the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program (CAADP) adopted in Maputo in 2003 and renewed in Malabo in 2014 (African Union Commission, 2024). The CAADP Kampala Strategy and Action Plan 2026–2035, adopted earlier this year, is set to help improve our trajectory. The plan engages African heads of state to accelerate the transformation of agriculture on the continent from a production dominant system to an integrated and climate resilient system—i.e., an agrifood system.
A number of factors make the need for transformation urgent: population growth (Africa is expected to hit 2.5 billion by 2050); increasing urbanization and the “youth bulge,” that is, the outsize proportion of the youth population on the continent relative to the rest of the world; climate change; and threats to the livelihoods of smallholder farmers. Addressing these challenges will require a well-functioning agricultural knowledge and innovation system (AKIS) (Kuiper and Roling, 1991), of which research and education networks (RENs) and universities are necessary constituents.
CAADP 2026–2035 identifies six strategic objectives, including Objective 1, intensifying sustainable food production, agro-industrialization, and trade and Objective 3, ensuring food and nutrition security.
If we are to meet these goals, quality research must be undertaken to generate relevant science solutions. Data must then be synthesized, evidence-based policy recommendations generated, and end-users equipped to exploit technologies and innovations.
To achieve this, AKIS stakeholders need to exchange ideas, share knowledge with one another, and receive feedback. This means providing them access to research facilities, including open research infrastructure and practices that enable openness, transparency, and accountability.
Such infrastructure and practices, which are lacking in many universities and countries across the continent, would not only foster increased access to research and scholarly publications, but hold the potential to increase Africa’s contribution to global science.
Godwyns Onwuchekwa, Community Engagement Specialist, Global Tapestry Consulting
African scholar-led communities will be vital to shaping a more inclusive and representative open access movement. To realize their potential, these communities need to build capacity, train leaders, and access international collaboration, while grounding their efforts in contextual approaches that address local challenges.
In order to amplify African leadership and visibility within global scholarly networks, and enhance the impact of regional initiatives, scholar-led communities should pursue targeted training—adapted to African systems and practices—in areas such as open science, reproducibility, and open peer review.
Targeted investment by publishers and other stakeholders in the global research ecosystem can help meet this need. For example, during my time at eLife, we sponsored globally connected but locally inspired initiatives to help African researchers develop their skills and networks, like a program created by participants in eLife Ambassadors, a global network of early career researchers, to train and improve the understanding of reproducibility in Africa. The popularity of these often-oversubscribed programs highlighted both the ambition of the community and the limited resources currently available in this area, illustrating the importance of broader and more consistent support from funders, institutions, and publishers.
That said, significant structural barriers continue to limit African participation in shaping global principles and frameworks for research. African researchers are disproportionately affected by visa restrictions, high travel costs, and limited access to international conferences and committees. Combined with high publishing fees, low success rates in securing funding, and persistent biases against African-led scholarship, these challenges restrict the ability of African voices to influence the infrastructures of global knowledge production.
To advance open science and inclusive knowledge sharing, African scholar-led communities must build and sustain local knowledge ecosystems, strengthen regional publishing infrastructures, promote indigenous knowledge, and lead collaborative initiatives that reflect local priorities. At the same time, African researchers must engage with global platforms as equal partners, not passive participants.
Research and Education Networks (RENs) in Africa have a particularly important role to play. By fostering local ownership and creating a critical mass of participation, RENs can support capacity building, especially around the use of locally available infrastructures, promote the adoption and use of preprints, and enhance understanding of publishing systems. This work must include addressing entrenched systems of research evaluation, particularly the overreliance on journal impact factors, which delay the visibility of African research and undervalue contributions that are locally relevant. As the open access movement accelerates, there is an urgent need to increase African scholars’ engagement with its principles and practices.
At the same time, African scholar-led communities must build solutions of their own: strengthening local publishing infrastructures, investing in regional platforms, and experimenting with models that better reflect their contexts and priorities. These efforts point to the importance of local ownership and the need for funders, institutions, and partners to reinforce such initiatives at scale.
Ultimately, open science cannot be truly open until it reflects the full diversity of global knowledge. Recognizing, resourcing, and elevating African-led contributions is not only a matter of fairness—it is essential for building a richer, more relevant, and more equitable scholarly future.
Bernard Dione, EBAD/COBESS (Translated from French by Pamela Abbott, with assistance from Google Translate and Microsoft Translator through Word)
University faculty need access to scientific literature in order to advance research and enrich teaching. In Senegal, two organizations—the National Center for Scientific and Technical Documentation (CNDST) of the Ministry of Higher Education and the Consortium of Higher Education Libraries in Senegal (COBESS), which brings together the country’s 35 university libraries—are partnering to remove obstacles that impede equitable access to scientific information.
The guiding principle behind this collaboration is the pooling of resources. CNDST and COBESS are working to ensure that every university library in the country has an online public access catalog (OPAC), a digital library, and an institutional repository. The library of Assane Seck University of Ziguinchor has already set up an institutional repository; while the central library of Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar (UCAD) has its digital library, which they are in the process of transforming into an institutional repository. The library of Gaston Berger University (UGB) in Saint-Louis is quite advanced in the creation of its own institutional repository.
These infrastructures are increasingly known and used by researchers. For example, the Rivières du Sud institutional repository of the Assane Seck University of Ziguinchor (UASZ) has accumulated, since its creation on June 9, 2021, a total of 15,379 visits. Visit statistics from February 2025 to the end of July 2025 are shown in Figure 1.
In the same period, the repository was searched 12,191,160 times. As for the UCAD digital library, the number of visits is particularly significant. Figure 2 shows visit statistics for the first six months of 2025.
We do not yet have qualitative data to understand the researchers’ point of view. For now, we can only note that some of them have started to deposit copies of their work to establish their institutional repositories.
Once the institutional repositories have been created at each university level, we intend to establish a national open archive. COBESS and CNDST are also working to interconnect the catalogs of the various university libraries into a collective national catalog, establish a central file of theses and dissertations, and set up a national repository for research data, along with other collaborative projects.
Ed Pentz, Executive Director, Crossref
Early-career African researchers face unique challenges when they engage with the global scholarly ecosystem, but understanding these systems can make the difference between visibility and obscurity for their research outputs. The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) offer a crucial evaluation framework to identify genuinely open, equitable services.
These 16 principles cover governance (community-controlled with transparent decision-making), sustainability (long-term funding and safeguards against commercial capture), and insurance (open-source code and data in case services fail). If an infrastructure service hasn’t adopted POSI, it’s worth asking why.
Understanding POSI empowers researchers to make informed choices about which platforms to trust with their work. When journals and repositories follow open infrastructure principles, African research gains sustainable pathways to global visibility.
Another challenge is that infrastructure, and in particular metadata and persistent identifiers (PIDs), aren’t the most exciting topics. Early career researchers, who have a lot of other things to worry about, are often told to “just get a PID.” But what type of identifier is it? What services connect to it? Is it part of the global open science ecosystem? Is it sustainably governed? Is it truly open or commercially controlled? These questions reveal crucial information. For example, local or regional identifier solutions can be superficially attractive, but the danger is that they end up isolated and disconnected from the global open science ecosystem.
Universities, academic libraries, national research and education networks (NRENs), and governments must move beyond simply telling researchers to “get a PID,” and instead help them to understand which services are POSI adopters. This knowledge will help early-career researchers strategically navigate publishing opportunities, ensuring their contributions receive proper attribution while contributing to a more equitable research ecosystem in which African scholarship can flourish alongside global knowledge production.
Omo Oaiya, Chief Strategy Officer, WACREN
Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) are vital for ensuring the integrity, discoverability, and reuse of research outputs. Yet for many African institutions, globally dominant PID systems—particularly those based on digital object identifiers (DOIs)—remain prohibitively expensive, centralized, and poorly aligned with local research practices and funding realities.
At WACREN, we’ve responded by launching PIDsLink, a federated PID infrastructure anchored in the use of Archival Resource Keys (ARKs). ARKs are globally resolvable, freely mintable, and flexible, making them a pragmatic foundation for regional and national PID strategies. While WACREN hosts the core service, it enables decentralized control through national research and education networks (NRENs), allowing institutions to manage identifiers and policies locally. This model strikes a balance between shared sustainability and local autonomy.
In Nigeria, PIDsLink is being piloted as part of a broader strategy to establish sustainable and inclusive research infrastructure. As part of the emerging National Shared Repository program, we are also assessing how to integrate existing identifier systems, such as the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Identifier, a cost-free, repository-native PID already widely implemented via OAI-PMH. With global resolution services like the CORE OAI Resolver now operational, OAI Identifiers present a practical complement to ARKs for repository-based assets. But the centralized nature of such services underscores the strategic importance of developing mirrored or regionally governed resolvers to ensure long-term autonomy and infrastructure resilience.
Together, these efforts support a layered, interoperable PID ecosystem—rooted in openness, equity, and sustainability—where persistence is not a privilege, but a right.
Open science may be an ideal to which African scholars are turning in order to effect much needed change. The above perspectives on how African scholars can navigate and leverage this research ethos lead to some key takeaways:
Takeaway 1:
In African scholarship and scientific endeavor, key divides will continue to persist, due mainly to systemic and structural injustices that are difficult to shift. Hence, local solutions to local problems that are locally meaningful should be pursued to alleviate the difficulties of research with a focus on local issues reaching the publics it is meant to serve—for example, open research infrastructures for supporting African agrifood systems.
Takeaway 2:
Research infrastructure is key to establishing a basis on which local knowledge can be curated and made available to science and society for their mutual benefit; but it is a socio-technical production, constantly in a state of change, which, especially in the African context, needs to incorporate the tenets of inclusivity, sustainability, and ethical practice—for example, being mindful that underlying technical standards (e.g. PIDs) need to also address inclusivity and sustainability.
Takeaway 3:
African scholars need to exploit what works in their contexts and aligns with their values rather than trying to mimic a Western model of scholarship and doing science. This includes, for example, embracing a community-driven ethos and leveraging networks to promote distributed, entrepreneurial action, like being proactive in developing open knowledge ecosystems based on African scholarship.
Takeaway 4:
When it comes to the role of academic libraries and knowledge creation in an African context, the decolonization movement has highlighted several issues with the status quo. As these debates continue, these same actors will need to deal with the tensions they generate when it comes to enacting openness in African academic institutions, e.g., openness vs. extractivism, openness on whose terms, with whose financial backing, openness within which communities. The progress made in establishing national open access repositories in Senegal creates opportunities to address these issues.
Takeaway 5:
We can take bold steps to make research ecosystems function better for African scholars: making creative decisions on sustainable costing models for open infrastructure, mentoring and supporting early career researchers toward future research leadership, reforming incentivization and assessment of research endeavours, institutionally recognizing different forms of knowledge and ways of creating knowledge, encouraging grassroots action on openness from community-driven groups. Initiatives such as POSI, PIDsLink, LIBSENSE, and African scholar-led communities offer new opportunities for early career researchers to aspire toward leadership based on a more open and collaborative approach.
To make progress in any of these areas will require policy interventions that promote an open and collaborative science ecosystem with an African ethos. Grassroots community activism in LIBSENSE has led to some traction in this area, with early career researchers advocating for policy change in their institutions. LIBSENSE has also developed policy templates and tools, e.g., national open science roadmaps, and is tracking policy change through its policy observatory. It is clear, though, that national and regional policies on open science will be necessary to drive lasting, transformative change.
Abbott, P., Abduldayan, F. J., Agyei, D. D., & Salau, S. A. (2025). How Early Career Researchers are Advancing an African Approach to Open Science. https://doi.org/10.1146/katina-042925-1
Abbott, P., Cerqueira Pereira de Lemos, D., Oaiya, O., & Amponsah, E. (2025). LIBSENSE Impact Report: Impact Evidence and Stakeholders’ Testimonials from 2016-2024 [Report]. The University of Sheffield. https://doi.org/10.15131/shef.data.28781237.v1
African Union Commission. (2024). Guidelines for Submission of Independent Memoranda for the CAADP Post-Malabo Agenda.
Kuiper, D.; Roling, N.G. (1991). Proceedings of the European Seminar on Knowledge Management and Information Technology Wageningen Agricultural University: Wageningen, The Netherlands, pp. 8–20
Young, C. (2012). The Postcolonial State in Africa: Fifty Years of Independence, 1960–2010. University of Wisconsin Press. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/19/monograph/book/21856
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