The theme of this year’s International Open Access Week, which kicked off yesterday, is ‘Community over Commercialisation,’ and today’s TL;DR Shorts contributor is someone who knows a huge amount about community and research culture. Joy Owango is the Founding Director of the Training Centre in Communication, or TCC Africa. In today’s episode, Joy talks about how open research is helping increase the visibility and representation of research being done in Africa.
Joy believes that open access is one of the best things that has ever happened for researchers. It has raised the visibility of African research outputs by reducing or removing blockers to the inclusion of the amazing and impactful research being carried out, such as the fees associated with publishing novel research in top-tier journals with broad engagement. Publishers play a key role in driving this change, and overcoming this challenge requires them to fundamentally change how they work with the research community across the world.
Joy reminds us that there are also unexpected consequences that must be overcome as a global research community. An open research culture should allow more people to access existing research information and also contribute to it without financial or other barriers. While preprints and APC waivers exist, there is still a long way to go to ensure that all actors across the research ecosystem are taking advantage of these programmes of research transformation to break down barriers to inclusion in research and foster greater translation of research into real-world impact.
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