Speaker
Description
In his seminal work on Open science as a collective tool of empowerment and cognitive justice, Piron et al. (2018) has shown that Open Access offers African scholarship unprecedented opportunities to reach previously inaccessible audiences—nationally, regionally, and internationally. This is a great opportunity to improve the dissemination, visibility, and impact of research findings from the African continent. In that way Open access can facilitate the enhancement of knowledge produced in the periphery, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. But to achieve this, Africa needs e-infrastructures which can ensure the sustainable adoption of OA by avoiding obstacles related to what is known as cognitive injustices (digital literacy, exclusion of local knowledge, cleavage between science and society, Western research system as a norm, epistemic alienation, scientific publications system, language of science). I believe and I will demonstrate that The Directory of Open Access Journals is such e-infrastructure that can leverage Developpement through open Access.
The DOAJ is a website that hosts a community-curated list of open access journals and is maintained by Infrastructure Services for Open Access. High quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals are indexed through this directory, following a strict evaluation process by scholarly publishing and subject experts.
This presentation aims to cover the following:
DOAJ's Actions in West and Central Africa;
An overview of uses of DOAJ for different stakeholders (researchers, funders, librarians and publishers);
the benefits that DOAJ can bring to the development of West and Central Africa, through openness to publications and data;
The obstacles DOAJ is facing to achieve its full potential and the plan to overcome them.
