How important is internet visibility of African agricultural research outputs?

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Interview with Harry Heemskerk, Head of Information Projects and Products at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam (The Netherlands).

Agricultural research outputs need to be shared and made visible in order to increase the visibility of African agricultural research institutes, the visibility of individual researchers and the visibility of concepts and research outputs.

The digitalisation and digital repositories are important:

a) for the preservation of the content,

b) for the preservation of the URL-links to the publications,

c) to store publications in one place but with visibility in many other places.

Therefore open decentralised standards are needed like the Open Archives Initiatives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). In African research institutes this expertise in more and more available and some additional training is needed on copy right issues. Policy/Decision makers need to be involved to create awareness about open access.

The Royal Tropical Institute organised with the Association of African Universities (AAU) and with the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Ghana (CARLIGH) a workshop in Accra in March 2009 about experiences with digital repositories for Chief librarians and for vice chancellors.

Similar initiatives are taken by the Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL) and the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP).

Harry Heemskerk answers the question on what convinces key decision makers and which resources are needed.

References:

Accra, 16/04 INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORY ADVOCACY SEMINAR

Accra, 16/04 AAU holds seminar to improve access to African scholarly works

Related:

eIFL

Gaining the momentum: Open access & advancement of science and research, CSIR Conference Centre, Pretoria, South Africa 14 May 2009 - South Africa

INASP:

Training the Trainer in Information Literacy 20 April 2009 - Malawi
Institutional Repository Workshop - COSTECH 23 April 2009 - Tanzania
Training in the use of Koha Library Automation System 20 May 2009 - Uganda