Angela Okune: During the discussion, Sulaiman Adebowale observed parallels across the continent where many academic scholars began to set up journals, largely due to a decrease...Read more
On social science knowledge production
Ake, Claude, Social Science as Imperialism: the theory of political development , Ibadan University Press, 1979.
Bank, Leslie, Nico Cloete and Francois van Schalkwyk (eds), Anchored...Read more
AO: This MIT Technology Review post describes the machine learning community on the continent and places companies like IBM front and center of these "blossoming" communities. There is an important critical labor and tech training component to be unpacked here.
The article quotes...Read more
AO: This quote (see copy-pasted below) states that IBM (Research) believed that "many of the hardest problems in our world today, particularly in Africa, are problems of information." The speaker...Read more
The opening (copy-pasted below) from this IBM Research keynote talk by the CTO of Watson outlined why IBM has an optimistic view for "Africa" - because of projected growth in labor and...Read more
AO: This interview, conducted by Raphaël Thierry with Sulaiman Adebowale of Amalion Publishing points to the importance of broadening what constitutes knowledge or scholarly publishing. In order to achieve this, Adebowale describes the need for publishing expanded genre forms like "...Read more
Discussion on Open Access in Africa
March 31, 2020
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM Nairobi
Participants (listed alphabetically):
AO: This article (from September 2020) notes that despite a narrative that heavily circulated early in the global spread of the COVID pandemic that "vulnerable" and "high-risk" places, in Africa for example, were going to be devastated by COVID, it has not in fact played out that...Read more
Kate Meagher: An important clarifying point to raise about the current Plan S is that while it pushes for making journals open access, it is based on an author-pay article processing charge (APC)...Read more
This piece by Walter Bgoya and Mary Jay details efforts to free indigenous African publishing from "the constraints of the colonial past, the strictures of economic structural adjustment policies, the continuing dominance of multinational publishers (particularly in textbooks