15–19 Mar 2021
Online
UTC timezone
Digital Transformation for Development

Governance and Leadership for National and Institutional Repositories - the Ethiopia Example

Not scheduled
10m
Online

Online

Presentation Open Science and Open Access Poster Session

Speaker

Prof. Margareth Gfrerer (Education Strategy Centre)

Description

Building on the successful implementation of the National Academic Digital Repository of Ethiopia (NADRE) [1, 2] as a deposit of academic and research documentation as well as data the NADRE designers facing the current challenge to define governance and leadership strategies for the NADRE. For this purpose, Ethiopian Institute of Higher Education (EIHE) together with the Higher Education Strategy Centre (HESC) is drafting a concept how standards, rules and regulations could bring accountability and quality to NADRE that NADRE could be considered as an accountable and reliable source contributing to Open Access Open Data Open Science.

Data quality management and data governance are summarised in data governance frameworks [3] for corporate approaches [4] but very little information is available for repository governance and leadership at university level. Therefore, an EIHE-HESC working group has taken on the task to analyse the university governance and leadership approaches at selected Ethiopian universities and to learn how these approaches are applicable for NADRE. This analysis will take into account that some of the universities feed NADRE from their institutional repositories whereas others will use NADRE for the purpose of their institutional repository in the same way as for the national repository.

The governance analysis intends to define quality management roles, decision making processes and responsibilities. The leadership analysis will describe the way, how to integrate NADRE at the university presidency level. Both, NADRE governance and leadership will bring NADRE into the academic management area of the universities and will clarify the positions of University libraries and IT-departments as service providers. This approach will break up the current practice in Ethiopia, where faculties work in close cooperation with libraries or IT departments in populating the NADRE.

In the context of governance and leadership it is an imperative to consider the top-down and bottom-up approach of the information flow between the different management levels at universities and from the universities to the Ministry of Science and Higher Education - as the head organisation of all public universities and of NADRE. Therefore, this approach sees the faculties as collaborators for the respective university presidents in their efforts to bring quality and accountability to disposable research documentations at institutional level and at national level.

The presentation will (i) show the importance of NADRE governance and leadership at the levels of the stakeholders such as the Ethiopian Ministry of Science and Higher Education, university presidencies, IT-departments and libraries; (ii) explore standards and principles on information and data quality management applicable for Open Access Open Data Open Science; (iii) comparing the usefulness of the FAIR principles for data governance.

References:
[1] https://nadreweb.ethernet.edu.et
[2] https://nadre.ethernet.edu.et
[3] Gwen, T. (2014): The DGI Data Governance Framework
[4] Wend, K. (2007): A model for Data Governance

Primary author

Prof. Margareth Gfrerer (Education Strategy Centre)

Co-authors

Prof. Roberto Barbera (Catania University) Mr Behailu Korma (Higher Education Strategy Center)

Presentation materials