Open access publishing in Africa: advancing research outputs to global visibility

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to examine the status of Africa in the open access environment as well as the challenges of providing global visibility to African research outputs. A descriptive bibliometric approach was adopted for the study. Data was extracted from two world repository directories (Registry of Open Access Repositories - ROAR and Directory of Open Access Repositories - DOAR) and Directory of Open Access Journals – DOAJ to determine the presence of Africa and size of repositories and records found in the directories. Findings reveal that only 20 African countries have presence in ROAR and DOAJ, but 22 countries have presence in DOAR. South Africa has more repositories in ROAR and DOAR while Egypt has over 70% of African contributions to DOAJ. The subject coverage of the repositories indicates that there are more publications in the sciences than there are in the social sciences and humanities; the preferred languages of publication in the directories are English, German and French. Though there is slow adoption of publishing in open access journals in Africa, there has been an increase in the number of open access journal articles from 2,019 in 2005 to 24,997 in 2014. The paper calls on African governments, researchers and librarians to deploy sustainable mechanisms to increase global visibility of African research findings using open access platforms.

Keywords: Open Access, Institutional Repository, Scholarly Communication, Research Productivity, Research Visibility, Africa