Bridging the Knowledge Gap for African Researchers through Open Access Publishing: The Case of African Higher Education Research Online (AHERO)

Abstract

This paper reports on African Higher Education Research Online (AHERO), an innovative web based open access project that facilitates the communication of research on African higher education that is otherwise invisible. In addition, the paper demonstrates the functionality of the AHERO website, to show how and why authors may deposit their papers; and provides a report of the methods used to populate the archive, how AHERO deals with copyright and the progress that has been made thus far. Some experiences are shared. It ends with the conclusions and recommendations drawn from an assessment survey.

Open Access Research Trends in Higher Education: A Literature Review

“…A group of authors focused their attention on the "Austrian Transition to Open Access (AT2OA)", authorized by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy [19,33,35,[38][39][40][41]. According to [29] in this project, running from 2017 to 2020, "the 21 public universities cooperate to promote OA through concerted measures" [29].…”

“…Works on repositories focus on diagnosing existing repositories [56,70], presenting specific projects or initiatives for putting in place repositories [29,37,41,51,52,56,61], or in studying the challenges faced by researchers and other stakeholders for embracing OA. These challenges could be partly mitigated, if they took advantage of repositories [44,62,64], while others show the challenges for fully taking advantage of repositories [45,58].…”

“…This repository is semi-automated and focuses on African education. An online survey to evaluate AHERO was made among 26 countries; and the results showed this repository has been successful especially among Uganda, South Africa, and Kenya users, and could represent the start point to encourage OA among disciplinary communities in Africa [41].…”

Africa’s challenges in the OA movement: risks and possibilities

“…Is there a risk that Western publishers might try and usurp the African OA experience, or to hijack its intellect? Over the years, starting in the early 2000s, a number of initiatives have been developed to assist Africa emerge from behind the pack to alongside the pack in terms of OA access and digital publishing, including AJOL, AHERO[33] (Sekabembe and Ssempebwa, 2011), INASP[34],Research4Life[35], including Hinari, AuthorAID, AGORA, OARE and ARDI, allowing mainly free access to traditionally "Western" publishers' journals, UNESCO's GOAP (GOAP, 2016), The AJPP [36], ILSSA[37] and other initiatives (Nwagwu and Ahmed, 2009;Smart and Murray, 2014). Even though African intellectuals may be tempted to be incorporated into leading publishers' profiles, such as Elsevier's proposed mega OA journal to showcase African research [38], African intellectuals should perhaps unite to create a unique digital OA publishing portfolio that unites local expertise, local academics and local leadership.…”