Heads of tertiary institutions and academic researchers in Africa are meeting in Accra to deliberate on providing regional and national data base systems to improve the management and access of African scholarly works.
The three-day international seminar organized by the Association of African Universities (AAU) in conjunction with other partners would also discuss policy guidelines that would clearly spell out the operations of such data systems, known as Institutional Repositories in Africa.
Professor Goolam Mohammedbhai, Secretary General of AAU said at the opening of the seminar on Monday that the AAU in 1998 saw the need to create a common platform to manage and disseminate theses and dissertations of African Universities electronically.
He said the AAU therefore, initiated a project dubbed; the Database on African Theses and Dissertation (DATAD) programme to, among other objectives, facilitate the development of copyright procedures and regulations to protect intellectual property rights of African university graduates and researchers.
Since 2003, Prof. Mohammedbhai said, 14,723 records had been received on a similar database developed for the continent.
“There are over 700 registered users on the database with more than 60 institutions from 25 different countries and about 600 individuals from 65 countries using the database,” he added.
The Secretary-General therefore expressed the hope that with such facilities in every country, scholarly works in Africa would be further promoted.
Prof. Mohammedbhai also pledged AAU's commitment to technically support all countries that wished to establish national repository centres.
Mr Alex Tettey-Enyo, Minister of Education, in a speech read on his behalf...commended the initiative of AAU to create such data base systems that would make African research publications more accessible both to Africans themselves and the other continents....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/20/2009 01:48:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
