National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) in Africa are organised under three umbrella Regional Research and Education Networks (RRENs), namely ASREN in the northern part of the continent as well as in the Middle-East and the Persian Gulf Region, WACREN in the western part of sub-Saharan Africa and the UbuntuNet Alliance in the eastern part of sub-Saharan Africa.
All African RRENs are very much committed not only to increase and capillarize connectivity among countries across the continent but also, and more importantly in the long term, to create a portfolio of services that could help and improve the collaboration between African researchers and their colleagues in the rest of the world, bridging the gaps in openness of research [1] and visibility of research outputs [2]. In this respect, the support of the European Union, through large projects like AfricaConnect3, and initiatives like LIBSENSE, in the area of digital repositories and Open Science more at large, play key roles.
This event, which is part of the programme of the 16th International Conference on Open Repositories (OR2021), frames itself in this landscape of actions and aims at promoting FAIR principles compliant commons such as digital repositories and persistent identifiers for both researchers and their research outputs. However, what makes this event different from similar ones is its innovative co-creation methodology. We aim at bringing in the same virtual place solution seekers, solution providers, policy makers and end users to trigger new collaborations and we propose a “try before you buy” approach.
The length of the event is 3 hours divided in three parts: a 80 minutes Workshop session, a 30 minutes Brokerage session, and a 70 minutes Hands-on tutorial. To know more, see the timetable.
Please, note that in order to actively participate in the Hands-on tutorial you need to follow the preliminary steps described in the Important information for the Hands-on tutorial page that you can reach from the left panel. Do it at your earliest convenience and no later than 3-4 days before the event.
References
[1] World map of Open Access policies, http://roarmap.eprints.org/dataviz2.html
[2] World scaled by number of documents published in Web of Science in 2017 with authors from each country, http://scholcommlab.ca/cartogram/