On August 6-7, 2024, librarians from across Zambia converged on Livingston for two days of training on Open Science as part of ZAMREN Week. Dr. Johanna Havemann and Chukwuebuka Ezeike from Access 2 Perspectives conducted the workshop. The well-attended training, facilitated by UbuntuNet Alliance and ZAMREN, strengthened the librarians’ capacity on Open Science and FAIR principles. The librarians were taken through the importance of permanent identifiers, including ORCID, ROR, and DOI, which link researchers to their work and make their work readily discoverable online.
The librarians were reminded that their institution’s research output, including dissertations, theses, research reports, and policy briefs, is invisible to the global research community if it is not readily discoverable and accessible online. Most of these documents are only available in hard copy within their institutions’ libraries. Therefore, the librarians were taken through practical steps to establish online, open-access repositories at their institutions and strategies for content curation and metadata management.
The training is part of UbuntuNet Alliance’s commitment to promoting Open Science in Africa as the Southern Node of the Africa Open Science Platform (AOSP).
About the Africa Open Science Platform
AOSP was established in 2017 with the aim of positioning African scientists at the cutting edge of data-intensive science by stimulating interactivity and creating opportunity through the development of scale efficiencies, building critical mass through shared capacities, and amplifying impact through a commonality of purpose and voice.