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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Discussion on Open Access in Africa
March 31, 2020
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM Nairobi
Participants (listed alphabetically):
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 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
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
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
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
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
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