Association of African Universities
Background: Founded in 1967, the Association of African Universities (AAU) began with 34 member universities and now represents over 450. It is a platform for research, reflection, consultation, co-operation and collaboration on higher education issues. It has established and increased its role in the five sub-regions of Africa and assembled teams of experts in relevant fields.
Mission: AAU’s mission is to be the leading advocate for higher education in Africa with the capacity to provide support for its member institutions in meeting national, continental and global needs. It aims to enhance the quality and relevance of higher education in Africa and strengthen its contribution to Africa’s development.
Who Owns Our Knowledge?
“At AAU, we've been heavily promoting open science and open access – whether diamond or gold. Our viewpoint is that as Africans, we need to be the owners of our own content.We must ensure that access control is managed responsibly, without restricting it through subscriptions or payments.”
“In our work and in our advocacy, we emphasize promoting open access to ensure that African scholars can retain the various rights to their works. There’s a distinction between authorship and then ownership. Authors sometimes may not necessarily own the rights to their work. You generated the work, but you are not exactly the owner, because you've ceded that right to a publisher. That distinction has to be clear.
“We have been in partnership with several organisations promoting open science and its associated platforms, for instance, the African Platform for Open Scholarship. Also, we’re engaging vice chancellors on the importance of open science and how we should really promote African-based, continental platforms as a way of moving towards open access and remove the barrier of APCs and other publishing costs.” I'd also like to invite stakeholders to engage with the AAU’s African Research Innovation and Development (AfRID) which houses research outputs by African Universities.
“Early-career researchers at African universities often face significant financial barriers when publishing their work. Our initiatives aim to dismantle these obstacles and provide scholars the fertile ground to advance their research.
“At AAU we are really promoting the need for our African universities to move and fully adopt the concept of open science. A key issue that comes up relates to promoting adoption of Open Science platforms at institutional levels so that publications in those platforms can be fully recognized in promotion and advancement within the university system. In some African universities, publications can only be counted for promotion if they are published in the so-called high impact journals. The question we should ask ourselves is " who determines what is classified as impact?”
“Another area in this discussion is how we can ensure that the existing continental platforms really get that level of recognition, so that publications made in those platforms equally are recognized. The issue of impact is one thing that is largely debatable. On what basis are we indicating something is of high impact and then another one is not? Is impact defined in terms of its practical impact? That is an ongoing discussion at a continental level – how can institutions fully adopt the concept of open science and recognize open science platforms where researchers can publish their research.”
-Dr. Felicia Nkrumah Kuagbedzi, Acting Coordinator - ICT, Communications and Knowledge Management, Association of African Universities