Discussion on Open Access in Africa
March 31, 2020
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM Nairobi
Participants (listed alphabetically):
0:02 CTO, IBM Watson We're very glad to be here in Africa. As you know, late last year, we opened our 4th research lab in IBM, here in Africa. And Africa represents to us an incredible, very exciting set of opportunities. And that's for many reasons, okay, not the least of which is the African...Read more
Angela Okune: Sulaiman Adebowale notes the challenge of ensuring a journal's sustainability and thinks aloud about different ways that could be possible:
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This research agenda is driven by profit and economic interests although the articulated narrative is about "solving Africa's grand challenges" which he states are "well-known." But then as he...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
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 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 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
Ruth Oniang'o describes why she started the Nairobi-based journal AJFAND and the funding challenge which the journal continues to face even after nearly 20 years of being operational.
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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 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