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
In this interview, Adebowale mentions NGOs becoming an alternative space for African scholars to do research and produce knowledge because of the state disinvestment in education and...Read more
Discussion on Open Access in Africa
March 31, 2020
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM Nairobi
Participants (listed alphabetically):
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
AO: I developed this instrument in preparation for a discussion about Open Access on the continent. Thank you to K. Meagher, L. Chan, and K. Fortun for their suggestions and comments on earlier versions of this instrument. I did not end up following the questions closely as we ran out of time (...Read more
This quote (copy-pasted below) details why IBM decided not to use the name "Watson" which is how they have branded their super-computer around the world but when they bring the technology to...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
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
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