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
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
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: 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
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
Discussion on Open Access in Africa
March 31, 2020
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM Nairobi
Participants (listed alphabetically):
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
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
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 recent Open Access monograph publication by Friederici et al. is particularly relevant for the macro and nano chapters in that they describe Nairobi's technology ecosystem and the entrepreneurs who work...Read more