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Afr. J. Lib. Arch. & Inf. Sc. Vol. 27, No. 2 (October 2017) 97-115
Open Access Publishing in Africa: Advancing
Research Outputs to Global Visibility
Ifeanyi J. Ezema and
Omwoyo Bosire Onyancha
Department of Information Science,
University of South Africa,
Pretoria, South Africa.
ifeanyi.ezema@unn.edu.ng;
ezemaji@unisa.ac.zaonyanob@unisa.ac.za
Abstract
The purpose of the study was to examine the status
of Africa in the open access environment as well
as the challenges of providing global visibility
to African research outputs. A descriptive
bibliometric approach was adopted for the study.
Data was extracted from two world repository
directories (Registry of Open Access Repositories
- ROAR and Di rectory of Open Access
Repositories - DOAR) and Directory of Open
Access Journ als – DOAJ to determine the
presence of Africa and size of repositories and
records found in the directories. Findings reveal
that only 20 African countries have presence in
ROAR and DOAJ, but 22 countries have presence
in DOAR. South Africa has more repositories in
ROAR and DOAR while Egypt has over 70% of
African contributions to DOAJ. The subject
coverage of the repositories indicates that there
are more publications in the sciences than there
are in the social sciences and humanities; the
preferred la nguages o f publicati on in the
directories are English, German and French.
Though there is slow adoption of publishing in
open access journals in Africa, there has been
an increase in the number of open access journal
articles from 2,019 in 2005 to 24,997 in 2014.
The paper calls on African govern ments,
researchers and librarians to deploy sustainable
mechanisms to increase global visibility of
African research findings using open access
platforms.
Keywords: Open Access, Institutional Repository,
Scholarly Communication, Research Productivity,
Research Visibility, Africa
Introduction
The ad option of ope n access scholarly
communication in Africa has been an issue of great
concern among scholars within and outside Africa
(Bowdoin, 2011; Ezema, 2011; Chalabi and Dahmane,
2012; Ezema, 2013; Nwagwu, 2013; Fox and Hanlon,
2015). Thes e scholars are concerned with the
provision of a sustainable ICT infrastructure, capacity
building and political will among African governments
for the adoption of open access in Africa. The
inc r e a sing interes t in open access scho l a rl y
communication is because of the great opportunities
which open access initiatives provide for wider
dissemination of research findings, particularly among
the developing countries. Open access movement
evolved in response to paucity of research materials
created by journal publishers who through business
models for scholarly journals continuously increase
the cost of journal subscription all over the world, as
subscription fees overwhelm library budgets (Mann,
von Walter, Hess and Wigand, 2009). In relation to
this, Lewis (2012) and Akpokodje (2014) posit that
open access emerged as alternative to high cost of
journal subscription among libraries. It is a platform
that offers scientists greater opportunities for wider
dissemination of research findings without article-
processing charges (Van Noorden, 2013). The open
access movement evolved with the development of
the World Wide Web in the 1990s, as researchers
found a new platform for research dissemination on
the Internet.
With this new information environment (that is,
the WWW), interest in open access publishing
tremendously increased, leading to the meeting of
the Open Society Institute in 2001. The outcome of
this meeting was the Budapest Open Access Initiative
(see http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/
IFEANYI J. EZEMA AND OMWOYO BOSIRE ONYANCHA
98
read) which provided different open access models,
namely the gold route which relies on the traditional
journal publication system, but shifts the financial
burden to the authors or the research funders and
the green route model which relies on authors
archiving their publications in repositories in the form
of pre-print or post-print (Sanchez-Tarrago and
Fernandez-Molina, 2009; Peekkhaus and Proferes,
2015). The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI)
has been described as the “first internationally
focused formal statement to articulate a comment
to open access” (Peekkhaus and Proferes, 2015).
Paragraph three of the BOAI clearly defines the
concept of open access as provided by the initiative:
By “open access” to this literature, we
mean its free availability on the public
internet, permitting any users to read,
download, copy, distribute, print, search,
or link to the full texts of these articles,
crawl them for indexing, pass them as
data to software, or use them for any
other lawful purpose, without financial,
legal, or technical barriers other than
those inseparable from gaining access to
the internet itself. The only constraint on
reproduction and distribution, and the only
role for copyright in this domain, should
be to give authors control over the
integrity of their work and the right to be
properly acknowledged and cited.
Other open access movements or initiatives
followed shortly after the Budapest Initiative, and
these include Bethesda Statement on Open Access
(2003) which focuses on access to biomedical
research and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access
(2 003) which was adopted for sc i e n c e an d
human i ties res earch. Al l these are aim ed at
advocating for the provision of free access to
scientific information to assist researchers and
libraries globally and more particularly in developing
countries (Peekkhaus and Proferes, 2015; Fox and
Hanlon, 2015). This development is a reflection of
earlier scholarly communication pattern before the
debut of the journal. Nwagwu and Onyancha (2015)
recently submitted that early scientific communication
was even more open than is being canvassed now
through OA initiative, and therefore predicted the
death of the journal as a channel for communication
of research reports.
Since the advent of open access movement,
African scholars and institutions have been struggling
to key into this initiative for global dissemination of
their research reports using the platform. Self-
archiving offers researchers opportunity of depositing
their research reports (in the form of preprints or
post prints) in open repositories (Onyancha, 2011);
while open access journals publish research reports,
which are freely made available to scholars without
any access barriers. The last two decades have
witnessed an increase in publication of open access
journals funded through article-processing charges
(APC) from authors (Fox and Hanlon, 2015) or
through funding from agencies and organisations
such as universities. The Directory of Open Access
Journals (DOAJ) (see https://doaj.org/) was launched
in 2002 during the First Nordic Conference on
Scholarly Communication (Stenson, 2011). Since then,
DOAJ hosts a number of open access journals from
many countries all over the world under the Creative
Commons Attribution license (https:// creat ive
commons.org/licenses/by/2.0/) which permits sharing
(copy and redistribute the material in any medium or
format) and adapting (remix, transform, and build upon
the material) for any purpose, even commercially.
The benefits of this new publication platform
have been reported in a number of published works.
While Hitch (2005) and Ezema and Ugwu (2013)
demonstrate that open access (OA) publishing
increases citation impact; Garner, Horwood and
Sullivan (2001) have noted that OA ensures speedy
dissemination of research findings to a wider
audience and ensures adequate archiving of scientific
data. Similarly, Correia and Teixeira (2005) remark
that open access drives creation of institutional
repositories that are now current indicators of
universities’ quality, prestige and global visibility. But
even with these benefits, there has been reported a
slow response in the adoption of institutional
repositories in Africa (Kakai, 2009; Adewumi and
Ikhu-Omoregbe, 2010; Ezema, 2011; Zaid and Okiki,
2015) when compared with other regions such as
Europe and America. While Ezema (2011) canvassed
for creation of awareness among libraries and
researchers, Zaid and Okiki believe that building
collaboration among libraries would improve the
situation.
OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHING IN AFRICA 99
Though low research productivity has been
reported in Africa (Ezema, 2010; Gailard, 2010;
Nwagwu, 2013), the greatest challenges that African
researchers fac e incl ude poo r vis ibility and
dissemination of their research reports (Ezema,
2013). A large proportion of local content materials
often regarded as grey literature such as theses and
dissertations, conference/seminar papers, inaugural
lectures, and others, are poorly distributed for
international visibility and thus present Africa as
bereft of research production (Chisenga, 2006;
Ezema, 2013). Consequently, Africa is often
regarded as only consumer of scientific research
productivity, leading to low ranking of African
universities as revealed in The Times Higher
Education’s (2015) World University Rankings
2014-2015, powered by Thomson Reuters. It appears
that the low visibility and the ranking of African
universities are linked with inability to adopt open
access publication.
Si nce the devel o p ment of open access
movement many studies have investigated the
constraints to adoption of open access publishing in
Africa. This study focuses on the status and adoption
of open access movement in Africa using freely
available global repositories such as open DOAR,
DOAJ and ROAR to enhance wide dissemination
of their local contents and global visibility of its
research outputs. Specifically, the study intends to:
i. Determine the contributions of Africa in the
world repository directories.
ii. Find out the types of contents in the African
repositories.
iii. Identify the archiving software for the African
repositories.
iv. Determine the subject coverage of open access
publications in Africa.
v. Identify the most frequently used languages in
open access publishing in Africa.
vi. Determine the trends in the growth of open
access publishing in Africa.
Brief Literature Review
Open access movement provides researchers with
opportunities of free availability of scientific
information (Nwagwu, 2013), as it increasingly
breaks down access barriers which for years have
slowed down universal availability of scientific
information. Since the launch of OA initiative over
twenty years ago, the number of OA journals has
been growing at the rate of 30% per annum (Laakso,
Welling, Bukvova, Nyman, Bjork and Hedlund, 2011),
and approximately half of the articles are published
in journals with article-processing charges (Solomon
and Bjork, 2012). Scholars have identified the
challenges of OA publishing in Africa; some of which
include funding shortages (McKay, 2011; Ezema,
2011), language barriers (Bowdoin, 2011; Chalabi and
Dahmane 2012), inadequate ICT infrastructure, and
highly skilled ICT experts (Ezema, 2011; McKay,
2011; Nwagwu, 2013). The technological challenges
suggest low web usage and lack of access to the
global scientific information on the web (Nwagwu
and Ibitola, 2010), resulting in skewed distribution of
knowledge in favour of the West. Other hindrances
to open access publishing bother on institutional
inertia because of doubt of its acceptability by some
institutions for promotion, retention of tenure and
access to research grants (Mann, von Walter, Hess
and Wigand, 2009; Harley, Earl-Novell, Arter,
La w r e n c e a n d K ing, 2007; Schonfeld and
Housewright, 2010) and creation of awareness
(Utulu and Bolarinwa, 2009; Swan and Brown, 2004).
The study of Utulu and Bolarinwa (2009) reported
increasing awareness of open access publications,
but with low use as publication channel. While the
study of Harley et al. (2007) raised the concern on
the pre stige of OA jou rnals, Sc h o nfeld and
Housewright (2010) remark that researchers are
more interested in publishing in journals which will
not present any doubt when submitted for promotion.
However, a study by Bjork and Solomon (2012)
observe s that researc h grant ors have star t ed
requesting for open access publishing from grantees.
For instance, the National Institute of Health requires
open access publishing for all its funded research to
reduce the cost of subscription of health researchers
(Roehr, 2004). Another study also found an increasing
open access publishing from sponsored research
(Bjork, Welling, Laakso, Majlender, Hedlund and
Gounason, 2010). Another impediment to open
access is the perceived poor editorial quality and peer
review mec h anism (Row lands , Nicholas an d
Huntington, 2004; Nicholas and Rowlands, 2005).
The belief of many is that OA publishing does not
IFEANYI J. EZEMA AND OMWOYO BOSIRE ONYANCHA
100
pass through proper journal peer review processes;
therefore, it is usually rejected when submitted for
promotion or other research appraisal purposes. This
perceived low ranking of open access journals is
demonstrated in the study by McVeigh (2004) who
reports that OA journals were heavily represented
in low ranking journals found in Journal Citation
Report of Thompson Reuters of 2003. However, this
may not be unique to only OA journals because the
skewed citations reports of Thompson Reuters have
been reported in a number of literatures (Loonen,
Hage and Kon, 2007; Moed, 2005; Meho 2007). A
later study by Giglia (2010) using the Directory of
Open Access Journals (DOAJ) found that of 355
science-based OA journals, only 38% are in Science
Citation Index, while of 30 OA journals (54%) are
in Social Science Citation Index – showing a little
improvement in ranking from McVeigh’s (2004)
study.
Another major constraint of adoption of open
access publishing is funding. The development of
institutional repositories to drive open access
archiving requires huge capital, which many
universities may not afford without support from
funding bodies such as government and other local
and international organisations interested in funding
research. Unfortunately, in Africa, governments pay
lip services to research and scholarship. Nwagwu
(2013) has alluded to this in the unarticulated OA
policy by government agency such as the National
Universities Commission which has the mandate to
regulate all Nigerian universities. The same situation
may likely repeat itself in other African countries.
Another challenge is the reluctance of authors to
send their papers to OA journals that levy article-
proc e s s i n g charges (Eyse nbach, 2006) , as
observation has shown that assessment charges are
usually high.
Despite some of these constraints, studies
have shown a growing interest in accessing OA
research materials because of several perceived
benefits such as visibility and increased availability
of scholarly research outputs (Ezema, 2011; Bjork
and Solomon, 2012), greater citations and impact
influence (Eysenbach, 2006) and higher readership
penetration (Davis, 2011). The study of Davis (2011),
however, posits that the real beneficiaries of open
access publishing are not necessarily the research
co mmunity but the consume r s of sc i e n t if ic
information who rarely produce any research finding.
There have been attempts to provide evidence
of Africa’s contributions to open access scholarly
communication in studies such as Fox and Hanlon
(2015). Though the study found a low visibility of
African institutional repositories, it provided statistical
evidence of an increase in open access journals found
in DOAJ, with Egypt leading other African countries.
A study by Chimah, Ugwoke and Ogwo (2015), using
Registry of Open Access Repository (ROAR), found
that Nigeria has only nine repositories, representing
only 0.23% of the world total. Apart from South
Africa, the study failed to provide statistics on other
African countries. Another study by Stenson (2011)
found that 66% of the journals in DOAJ is published
in Europe and North America, while only 2% is
published in the whole of Africa, an increase from
1% in 2008. The study by Mann, von Walter, Hess
an d Wigand (2009) fo u n d th at 90% of 481
respondents agree that open access publishing will
guarantee free availability of research literature, but
only 28% had published in open access platform.
This implies a high level of access to OA publications,
but reluctance in publishing using open access
medium. A related study by Sanchez-Tarrago and
Fernandez-Molina (2009) on open access publication
in Cuban health research also found a low publication
rate in open access journals, but revealed that 85%
of the researchers agree to archive their publications
in open access institutional repositories. This is
related to the study by Frass, Cross and Gardner
(2013) which reports that majority of the respondents
agree to free availability of research literature, but
only 40% of them choose to publish in OA journals,
and 34% have really published using OA channels.
Dalton (2011) also found that open access option
has a relatively low consideration among researchers
in the choice of publication channels. However,
Xia (2010) reports an increasing awareness of OA
publishing using a longitudinal study spanning four
years. According to the study, the awareness has
increased from 50% in mid 1990s to 85% by 2007.
Ot he r studies have fo c u sed on citation
penetration of open access journals. One of such
studies is by Hajjem, Harnad and Gingras (2005)
which found that open access articles have more
citations consistently, than non OA articles; citation
advantages vary from 36% to 172%. This is in line
with an earlier study by Lawrence (2001) which
OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHING IN AFRICA 101
equally found that OA articles in computer science
have more citations than non OA articles.
The relati onship be t w e e n open access
publishi ng and global ranking has also been
investigated by Onyancha (2015) using Research
gat e – a social media platform which allows
researchers to self-archive their publications for
global visibility and access. The study found a
positive correlation between publications in open
access outlet and ranking of universities. Similarly,
Wren (2005) found a positive correlation of access
of article from a non-journal website and the journal
impact factor.
An o t h e r study by Adewumi and Ikhu -
Omoregbe (2010) looked at the archiving software
used in the management of institutional repositories
in Africa and found that DSpace and EPrint are the
most popular. It appears that many of the studies in
open access initiatives in Africa focused mainly on
challenges which impede the adoption of open access
scholarly communication and software utilisation.
The few studies that investigated current status of
Africa such as Fox and Hanlon (2015) merely
provided scanty information on the number of
institutional repositories and OA journals without
providing details. This informed the need for the
present study.
Research Methods and Materials
The study adopted a descriptive informetric approach
to determine the status of Africa in the open access
initiative in terms of the number of repositories,
number of open access journals, and number of
records deposited in the repositories as well as
published in OA journals. Data was extracted from
repository directories (that is, the Registry of Open
Access Repositories – ROAR, http://roar.eprints.
org/ and Directory of Open Access Repository –
DOAR, http://www.opendoar.org/) and Directory of
Open Access Journals – DOAJ, ROAR and DOAR
provide data on the number of registered repositories
throughout the world. While the data in ROAR is
limited to the number of repositories, software used
for archiving, types of repositories and number of
records, DOAR provides all the aforementioned
types of data as well as an in-built mechanism for
determining the repository statistics. Both directories
can be searched by types of repository, geographical
location of the repositories, types of archiving
software, etc. As at November 9, 2015, DOAR had
2987 repositories. DOAJ provides data on open
access journals from all over the world and has in-
built mechanism to conduct search by j ournal,
geographical region, article searches, among others.
As at November 9, 2015 when data was extracted,
the directory hosted 10,708 journals from 136
countries of the world.
Data was extracted into Microsoft Excel
within four days (November 7 – 11, 2015) for
computation. In both ROAR and DOAR, data for
each country was extracted by typing the country
name in the search field of the directory and through
that process the number of repositories and records
were generated. The same process was used to
extract data from DOAJ. However, data concerning
subject coverage, frequently used languages, and
trends in the growth of open access journals were
extracted by additional query of the database using
the in-b u i lt mechanism for gene r a t i n g su c h
information. All African countries with any open
access presence from the three directories were
included in the study. For the trends in open access
growth, data was generated for ten years period
(2005 – 2014) in line with the period open access
awareness began in Africa as indicated by Ubogu
(2006). Data was analysed using descriptive statistics
of frequency and percentages and presented in tables
and charts.
Results
The findings are presented and discussed in line with
the objectives of the study, namely contribution of
African countries to the world’s repositories, content
types of repositories in Africa, subject coverage of
OA journals, language of publication in the
repositories; and growth of OA publishing in Africa.
African Contributions to the World’s
Repository Directories
Table 1 reflects that Africa had 136 (3.4%) out of
4055 repositories in ROAR wherein South Africa
ranks first with 47 (34.6%), followed by Kenya with
14 (10.3%), and Egypt and Nigeria with 11 (8.1%)
repositories apiece. Only twenty African countries
out of about 56 had any form of repository in ROAR.
IFEANYI J. EZEMA AND OMWOYO BOSIRE ONYANCHA
102
A close observation shows that only five countries
had up to 10 repositories while half of the contributors
had less than three repositories each. The four top
ranked countries (South Africa, Kenya, Egypt and
Nigeria) contribut e d over 60% of the entire
repositories from Africa. Egypt had the highest
number of records in the directory, followed by South
Africa. However, the numbers of records in the
repositories of many of the countries are unknown,
while others were partially provided. For instance,
the number of records for Kenya with second highest
number of repositories is unknown, while Nigeria
with 11 repositories had information on only one of
the repositories. The unavailable number of records
in the repositories implies poor visibility of the
universities in Africa despite the presence of
repositories in their names, and this makes African
region to trail behind other continents in global
visibility of universities.
Table 2 shows the sub-regional distribution of
the repositories, which indicates that Southern Africa,
had the highest number of repositories with 45
(34.09%), followed by East Africa with 35 (26.52%)
repositories, North Africa with 27 (20.45%), West
Africa with 23 (17.42%), and Central Africa with
only 2 (1.52%). However, North Africa had the
highest number of records with 374,898 (46.97%),
followed by Southern Africa with 235,321 (29.48%),
and East Africa with 125,777 (15.76%). T he
contribution of Africa in the global distribution of
repositories in DOAR is comparably low. The
continent contributed only 132 (4%) of the global
total of 2987, as can be seen in figure 1. Europe
alone has nearly half (44%) of the global total.
Table 1: Distribution of African Repositories in Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)
Rank Countries No of % No of
Repositories Records Remarks
(N = 136)
1 South Africa 47 34.6 5763 Records for only 23 repositories
2 Kenya 14 10.3 NA Unknown number of records
3 Egypt 11 8.1 7505 Records for only 3 repositories
4 Nigeria 11 8.1 98 Records for only 1 repository
5 Zimbabwe 9 6.6 502 Records for only 2 repositories
6 Algeria 7 5.1 NA Unknown number of records
7 Tanzania 7 5.1 264 Records for only 2 repositories
8 Ghana 6 4.4 90 Records for only 1 repository
9 Sudan 5 3.7 NA Unknown number of records
10 Morocco 3 2.2 NA Unknown number of records
11 Lesotho 2 1.5 NA Unknown number of records
12 Mozambique 2 1.5 256 For the 2 repositories
13 Namibia 2 1.5 241 Records for only 1 repository
14 Senegal 2 1.5 NA Unknown number of records
15 Tunisia 2 1.5 NA Unknown number of records
16 Uganda 2 1.5 171 Records for only 1 repository
17 Botswana 1 0.7 NA Unknown number of records
18 Cameroun 1 0.7 26 Records for only 1 repository
19 Malawi 1 0.7 171 Records for only 1 repository
20 Rwanda 1 0.7 NA Unknown number of records
Total 136 1 0 0
World Total 4,055 3 .4
OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHING IN AFRICA 103
Table 2: Distribution of African Regions by Contribution to DOAR
Types of Contents in the Open Access
Repositories
The leading types of contents found in the repositories
of open DOAR were journal articles (73%),
followed by theses and dissertations (71%), and
conference and workshop papers (46%). It is clear
from figure 2 that Africa had low production of
datasets since it is the lowest type of content found
in African repositories in DOAR with only 3(2%)
repositories archiving datasets. In figure 3, we could
see that Afri c an re p o s i t o r i e s we r e more of
Figure 1: Global distribution of repositories in DOAR
inst itu tional ly-based rather than discipline or
government-based. A total of 120 (91%) of them
were institutional repositories, while 8(6%) were
discipline-based repositories (institutional repositories
are usually established by universities, research
institutes and other institutions of higher learning, while
discipline-based repositories are often established
by professional bodies); aggregating repositories
were 2 (2%) and government repositories were 2
(2%) showing that African governments lack interest
in open access initiatives.
African Region No of Repositories % No of Records % Me an
N = 132 N = 798,158 records/Rep.
Central Africa 2 1.52 69 0.009 34.5
East Africa 35 26.52 125.777 15.76 3593.6
North Africa 27 20.45 374,898 46.97 13885.1
Southern Africa 45 34.09 235,321 29.48 5229.4
West Africa 23 17.42 62,093 7.78 2699.7
IFEANYI J. EZEMA AND OMWOYO BOSIRE ONYANCHA
104
Figure 2: Types of Contents in African repositories
Figure 3: Types of African Repositories in DOAR
Software Used to Develop the Repositories
in Africa
In the development of institutional repositories, there
is often a choice between open source software,
which is freely available online, and proprietary
software, which is purchased from vendors. A total
of 97 (73%) repositories adopted DSpace for
archiving, making it the most dominant software
used among African repositories found in DOAR.
This was followed by EPrint with 12 (9%) while 4
(3%) archive their documents using Greenstone.
Information on archiving software of 7 (5%)
repositories was not known, while 2 (2%) of the
repositories adopted ContentPro. Other archiving
software used was Drupal and CONTENTdm. While
there was no explanation on the archiving software
for 6 (5%) other repositories, indications showed that
DSpace was the most preferred repository software,
probably because it is an open software (which is
relatively cheap to install and maintain) with user-
friendly features, as it had been noted by Adewumi
and Ikhu-Omoregbe, (2010).
OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHING IN AFRICA 105
Figure 4: Repository Software in DOAR
African Contributions to Directory of Open
Access Journals (DOAJ)
African contributions to Directory of Open Access
Journals presented almost a similar picture in regard
to the contents as in ROAR and DOAR; almost the
same countries re-appear as shown in Table 3.
Africa contributed 696 OA journals, accounting for
a me r e 6.5% of the 10,712 gl obal jo urnals
contributions as reflected in DOAJ. Twenty African
countries registered their presence in DOAJ with
Egypt contributing 538 (77.3%) journals, followed
by South Africa with 75 (10.78%) journals, and
Nigeria with 36 (5.17%) journals. Morocco and
Kenya cont ribut ed 9 (1.29%) and 7 (1.01%)
respectively. In sub-regional distribution of African
journals contribution, North Africa contributed 564
(81.03%), Southern Africa contributed 76 (10.92%)
and West Africa contributed 37 (5.32%). East and
Central Africa contributed 15 (2.16%) and 4 (0.57%)
respectively. However, East Africa had higher mean
articles per journal (416.8), followed by Southern
Africa (329.6) and North Africa (201.6). Central
Africa and West Africa had very low mean articles
per journal with 93.3 and 20.9 respectively.
IFEANYI J. EZEMA AND OMWOYO BOSIRE ONYANCHA
106
Table 3: Distribution of African Contribution to DOAJ
Subject Coverage of Open Access
Publications in Africa
A look at the subject coverage of the open access
repositories found in DOAR revealed that majority
of them (i.e. 88 or 66%) were multidisciplinary as
indicated in Figure 5. Science-related fields had more
coverage in the repositories than humanities and social
science. The science fields covered were general
science, which had 16 (12%) repositories; the
agriculture, food and veterinary science group had
15 (11%); and ecology and environment which had
11 (8%). Apart from these, health and medicine had
15 (11%), technology had 12 (9%), while computer
and information technology had 11 (8%) repositories.
Social sciences received more coverage than
humanities as evident in Figure 5. Business and
economics had 17 (12%) repositories; law and
politics; 16 (12%) repositories; general social
sciences; had 14 (10%) repositories while education
had 12 (9%) and library and information science 9
(6%) repositories. In the humanities, language and
literature had the highest with 9 (6%), followed by
history and archaeology with 7 (5%) repositories. It
is important to note that some of these subject fields
overlap, as a particular repository may cover two or
more subject areas.
African Region Countries No of Journals % No of Articles % Mean Article/
N = 696 N = 146,152 Journal
Central Africa Burundi 1 0.14 147 0.10 147
Cameroon 1 0.14 108 0.07 108
Congo DR 1 0.14 90 0.06 90
Rwanda 1 0.14 28 0.02 28
Total 4 0.57 373 0.26 93.3
East Africa Kenya 7 1.01 1396 1.00 199.6
Mauritius 2 0.28 2930 2.00 1465
Tanzania 1 0.14 1318 0.90 1318
Zambia 2 0.28 476 0.33 238
Uganda 3 0.43 132 0.09 44
Total 15 2.16 6,252 4.30 416.8
North Africa Algeria 6 0.86 101 0.07 16.8
Egypt 538 77.30 111067 75.99 206.4
Ethiopia 5 0.72 906 0.62 181.2
Libya 2 0.28 215 0.15 107.5
Morocco 9 1.29 530 0.36 58.9
Sudan 1 0.14 813 0.56 813
Tunisia 3 0.43 71 0.05 23.7
Total 564 81.03 113,703 77.80 201.6
Southern Africa Madagascar 1 0.14 131 0.09 131
South Africa 75 10.78 24,921 17.05 332.3
Total 76 10.92 25,052 17.14 329.6
West Africa Ghana 1 0.14 13 0.01 13
Nigeria 36 5.17 759 0.52 21.1
Total 37 5.32 772 0.53 20.9
African Total 696 100 146,152 100 210.0
World Total 10,712 6.50 2,012,039 7.26 187.8
OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHING IN AFRICA 107
Figure 5: Subject Coverage of Open Access Publications in Africa
Most Frequently Used Language in Open
Access Publishing in Africa
In scholarly communication, language of research
publication is critical to international scientific
publication. Olaoye (2009) has remarked that man’s
access to knowledge is facilitated through the use
of languages. Thus, it is usually difficult for a
researcher to comprehend research paper written
in a strange language. Scientific publications in
African languages are often considered as strange
to the global scholarly community; and consequently,
observations have shown that they are rarely
indexed by major databases such as Thomson
Reuters, Scopus, Medline and Google scholar. This
reduces the visibility of research published in
African languages.
In figure 6, English was the dominant
language of the publications in the open access
repositories found in DOAR with 122 (92%),
followed by French with 20 (15%); Arabic 13 (9%);
while Afrikaans had 5 (3%). Other languages used
in publishing research reports in the repositories were
Dutch with 3 (2%) and Portuguese 2 (1%). Apart
from Afrikaans; other African languages represented
in the repository were Sesotho, 2 (1%); Swahili 2
(1%) and Amharic 1 (0.7%). Generally, publications
in African languages were few, with almost all the
African langu ages coming from Eastern and
Southern Africa. In DOAJ (see Table 4); English
was also the dominant language with133;044 (89.9%)
records, followed by German with 4890 (3.3%);
French 2957 (2.0%) and Dutch 2110 (1.4%). The
most frequently used African language is Afrikaans
with 1338 (0.9%), followed by Isipedi with 1160
(0.8%) records; the two are South African languages.
IFEANYI J. EZEMA AND OMWOYO BOSIRE ONYANCHA
108
Figure 6: Frequently Used Language in Open Access Publishing
Table 4: Frequently used languages of publications in DOAJ
Trends in Open Access Publishing in Africa
The trend of open access publications in Africa
drawn from DOAJ is shown in Figure 7. The ten-
year trend (2005 –2014) indicated a very low level
of open access publishing in 2005 with 2,019 articles,
which increased to 2,340 in 2006. By 2009, it had
doubled to 4,881 publications; and by 2010, it rose to
7,261 publications. The number of open access
publications in 2011 was 12,019 but jumped to 21,086
in 2012 (almost double within a year), and then began
to grow slowly between 2012 and 2013, but rapidly
increased to 24,997 publications in 2014.
Language Freq. (N = 148,039) Percentage
English 133,044 89.9
German 4890 3.3
French 2,957 2.0
Dutch 2110 1.4
Afrikaans 1338 0.9
Isipedi 1160 0.8
Spanish 716 0.5
Arabic 654 0.4
Portuguese 301 0.2
Italian 164 0.1
Turkish 145 0.1
Russian 140 0.1
Japanese 134 0.1
Czech 134 0.1
Xhosa 121 0.1
Dutch Flemish 12 0.01
Romania 8 0.01
Chinese 7 0.01
Serbian 4 0.01
Total 148,039 100
OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHING IN AFRICA 109
Figure 7: Ten-Year Trend of Growth of Open Access Publishing in Africa (2005 - 2014)
Discusion
The findings of the study present the realities of the
involvement of African countries in open access
publishing. Twenty-seven African countries did not
have any presence in OA publishing, resulting in low
contributions to the global open access publications.
Though twenty African countries registered their
presence in ROAR and DOAR, only 4 of them
(South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria and Kenya) had
substantial number of repositories and records. This
is in line with the findings of Fox and Hanlon (2015)
and Chimah, Ugwoke and Ogwo (2015) who also
found a low visibility of African institutional
repositories as South Africa and Egypt lead open
access publishing in Africa. The absence of so many
African countries in OA movement is surprising
because the thinking was that OA is a good
opportunity for developing countries to disseminate
their research outputs to the global scholarly
community. It appears that researchers in such
countries are yet to accept open access publishing
as a means of disseminating their research outputs
which Dalton (2011) identified as one of the
contraints of OA publishing. Another explanation
co uld be that th e people charge d with th e
establishment of OA repositories have not done their
work, resulting in researchers’ lack of access to the
facilities.
Although not surprising, considering the
reported low research output in Africa (see Ezema,
201 0 ; Gailard, 2010; Nwa g wu, 2013), the
contribut ions of Africa to OA movement are
co mparably lo w. The regio n ha d only 3.4%
contributions to ROAR and 4% contribution to DOAR
while Europe contributed 44% to DOAR. The
concern here is that Africa is finding it difficult to
bridge the visibility gap, even with the advantages
of open access environment.
Other findings indicate that journal articles,
theses and dissertations are the dominant contents
of the repositories in Africa. This is expected because
large proportion of reseach outputs all over the world
are usually disseminated through the journals while
postgraduate research is on the increase (Uborgu,
2006). Beside this, there is large archiving of theses
and dissertations because they are part of the
requirements of the students before they are awarded
degrees at both undergraduate and post graduate
leve ls. Since maj ority of the repositories are
institution-based, the contents will be dominated by
research emanating from the staff and the students
of the institutions. Observations have shown that
IFEANYI J. EZEMA AND OMWOYO BOSIRE ONYANCHA
110
institutions usually began by archiving theses,
dissertations and staff publications which are often
found in journals. More importantly, copyright
infringement is usually considered when archiving
materials in the repositories. Consequently, materials
that permi t self -archiving without copyr i ght
infringement such as theses, dissertations and open
ac c e s s journals we r e usually g i ven mo r e
consideration than books which would require
permision from the copyright owners. That probably
explains the low number of repositories which archive
books and book chapters.
Governments’ lack of interest in education and
re s e a rch is demonst r a t e d by the numb e r of
government repositories present in DOAR. This has
been the major challenge in open access movement
in Africa. The major funder of research all over the
world is government; and without the required
funding, universities and other research bodies will
find it almost impossible to establish repositories of
international standard. The government’s role in
funding of research has been highlighted by Nwagwu
(2013) who also points out that some government
agencies in charge of education and research lack
the policy framework for open access movement in
Africa.
The most popular archiving software used in
African repositories is DSpace used by over seventy
percent of the repositories. Though EPrint and
Greestone are equally used, they are not as popular
as DSpace, which recorded encouraging presence
in DOAJ, even though the major contributors remain
South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria and Kenya. The
dominance of South Africa and Egypt in open access
movement in Africa is demonstrated by their size of
journal contributions and articles in DOAJ in relation
to other countries. This dominance has been reported
in an earlier literature. A common characteristic of
the archiving software used by African repositories
is that they are all open source software. This is in
line with the finding of Adewumi and Ikhu-Omoregbe
(2010) in their study of features, architecture, and
design of African institutional repositories and
Onyancha (2011) in his study of self-archiving by
LIS schools in South Africa. The choice of open
sof t w a r e is probably because of t h e co s t
effectiveness and user-friendliness of the software.
While the presence of African countries in
ROAR and DOAR remains almost the same, findings
show that some countries such as Mauritius, the
Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya and
Madagascar, did not feature among the countries
that are visible in two repositories such as Fox and
Hanlon (2015). An interesting thing about the finding
is the increasing growth of open access journals in
Africa. From two percent as reported by Stenson
(2011), it has moved to 6.5% to 2015 as seen in Table
3. This growth rate is likely to be linked with
increasing campaigns for open access publishing as
documented in earlier studi es (see Utulu and
Bolarinwa, 2009; Swan and Brown, 2004; Mann, von
Walter, Hess and Wigand, 2009).
The most preferred language of publication for
both the repositories and the directory of open access
journals is English. This is expected, considering the
pos i t i o n of English la n guage in th e global
communication and the colonial background of many
of the countries pu bl i s h i n g in op e n access
environment. French and German languages equally
had sizeable shares in the language of publications
in Africa open access movement, and this also relates
with the colonial experience of African countries
which adopt the languages of their former colonies
as their official languages. It is however a source of
worry that African indigenous languages were rarely
used in research publications apart from Afrikaans
and Isipedi, both from South Africa. Unfortunately,
a large proportion of publications in African languages
may not have global visibility since papers indexed
in major databases are skewed in favour of English
and other major languages of the world.
The findings show an increasing growth of open
access publication in Africa even with the constraints
reported in extant literature (see McKay, 2011;
Ezema, 2011; Bowdoin, 2011; Chalabi and Dahmane
2012; Nwagwu, 2013). It is interesting to see that
within ten years, open access publishing in Africa
has grown from 2,019 articles in 2005 to 24, 997
articles in 2014. This is likely to be connected with
the increasing awareness in open access publishing
as reported by Xia (2010) and more acceptances
given to it by granting agencies, as documented in
earlier research by Bjork, Welling, Laakso, Majlender,
Hedlund and Gounason, (2010). If this growth rate
is sustained in DOAJ and more institutions join in
archiving their research reports in open repositories,
Africa may be on the way to enhance the visibility
of their research reports.
OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHING IN AFRICA 111
Conclusion and Recommendations
Although findings of this study reveal an increasing
growth of open access publishing in Africa, it is
obvious that there is still a lot to do considering the
huge opportunities OA presents to developing
countries to aggregate their research reports for
global visibility. The major challenge of Africa is
beyond research productivity; it is more of creating
international visibility for African research. With
about 56 indep e ndent countries and seve ral
universities and research centres, Africa has huge
research potentials. Nigeria alone has 141 universities
(National Universities Commission, 2015), and other
African countries have relatively large number of
universities. Regretably, only twenty African
countries have open access presence.
About the fate of the other countries in relation
to open access publication, could it be that such
countries lack awareness about OA movement? or
they are yet to graple with the ICT infrastructure
which drive OA publishing. Evidently, the twenty
countries with open access presence are yet to
explore their full potentials in OA publishing. For
instance, a country such as Nigeria with the huge
number of uni versitie s had les s than twenty
repositories and only 36 open access journals in
DOAJ. Should the 141 universities establish a
repository each, Nigeria would boast of over a
hundred repositories with large number of records.
This is likely to be the same situation in other
countries, particularly countries with few number
of repositories.
African governments, researchers, libraries
and librarians should strategise on enduring
framework to exploit the opportunities offered by
OA movement to its full potential. As it has been
noted in a number of published works (e.g. Ezema,
2011; McKay, 2011), funding is very critical to the
adoption of OA publishing, particularly as it relates
to establishing institutional repositories. African
governments need to address this. Open access
initiative is expected to be a priority of various
African governments in terms of building ICT
infrastructure which will drive the movement. The
poor ICT infrastructure in many African countries
have been highlighted as key impediment of OA
publishing by McKay (2011) and Nwagwu (2013),
and a recent study (Fox and Halon, 2015) reports
no sign of improvement. African Union should put a
sustainable ICT development plan through its agency
the New Partnership for Africa’s Development
(NEPAD). In addition to this, African governments
need to key into international best practices in
development of government repositories for open
government data. This is a social responsibility that
will guarantee adequate citizen involvement in
democratic governance.
University regulatory bodies in all African
countries have important roles to play to ensure that
African universities key into the OA initiatives through
critical policy framework for OA publishing to
enhance increased visibility of African research
findings. Nwagwu (2013) had earlier remarked that
some of these regulatory bodies provide little or no
OA policy framework to support OA movement in
the universities. Such policies, apart from providing
OA guidelines, should make OA presence as part of
the criteria for accreditation of programmes in the
universities.
Open access publishing is critical to the survival
of Afr ican researchers . Apart from providing
universal access to the global research literature, it
ensures the democratisation of research publishing.
Therefore, African researchers should see OA
publishing as a unique opportunity to improve on their
global visibility through self-archiving of their
publications in repositories and publication of their
research in open access journals. Extant literature
has demonstrated that open access publishing ensures
greater access to research publications which
promote citations and research impact of authors,
institutions and journals (see Lawrence, 2001;
Hajjem, Harnad and Gingras, 2005; Xia, 2010).
Another interesting development is the acceptance
of open access publishing by granting bodies and
institutions as reported by Bjork and Solomon (2012),
thus removing some factors which discourage open
access publishing.
The position of African libraries and librarians
is anoth er source of conc ern in open access
environment in the region. From the findings, there
is concern about the policy thrust of African libraries
in the development of institutional repositories. Ezema
(2013) identified relevant local content materials
which need to be digitised for the development of
open access repositories. However, from the findings
of the present study, it is obvious that very few
IFEANYI J. EZEMA AND OMWOYO BOSIRE ONYANCHA
112
academic libraries in Africa have begun such
dig i t i s a t i o n proj e ct s . T h ough funding a n d
technological support have been major constraints
for the development of institutional repositories,
African university libraries need to seek funding
opportunities from their parent institutions, and also
explore opportunities from private organisations
within and outside Africa. Various national library
associations and the International Federation of
Library Associations (IFLA) –Africa section, need
to develop an OA framework for African libraries.
OA movement is one change agent that cannot
be wished away because the main philosophy behind
it is to ensure free availability of research literature
to the international scholarly community. Fortunately,
it affords good opportunities for developing countries
that lack access to research lit erature due to
subscription barriers. Open access has come not
only to mitigate these developmental challenges but
also to localise and globalise scientific information
for democratisation of scholarship globally. Africa
cannot afford to miss this opportunity.
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Ifeanyi J. Ezema is the Digital Librarian, Nnamdi
Azikiwe Library, University of Nigeria Nsukka. He
holds Masters and Doctorate Degrees in Information
Science from University of Nigeria Nsukka. He was
a Post-doctoral Research Fellow in the Department
of Information Science University of South Africa
Pretoria from 2015 to 2017.
Omwoyo Bosire Ony ancha i s a Re s e a r ch
Professor at the Department of Information Science,
University of South Africa. Prof Onyancha was the
Head of the Department of Information Science,
University of South Africa, from July 2011 to
September 2015. He holds a PhD in Library and
Information Science from the University of Zululand.
