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Showing posts from June, 2022

The role of Open Access in developing African research and publications

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How far has the scholarly communications industry come in helping African researchers to publish their work? Inroads have been made but there’s still a way to go – and Open Access has a major role to play. A recent study showed that researchers using different article publication databases would not have access to the same level of content from the Global South ( Basson et al , 2022). This has, sadly, always been the case, as Western countries’ researchers have dominated in terms of article numbers and their respective citations ever since the first journals appeared in England and France in the 17th Century. While India and China have increased their research output markedly in recent years, the imbalance with other developing countries is still significant. In order to help redress this deficit, Digital Science and Dimensions has partnered with the Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa) since 2019. TCC Africa is a research capacity Trust based in the University of Nairobi

Sci Foo returns face-to-face in 2022

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The Digital Science team is getting ready to attend the annual Science Foo Camp in San Francisco, California this weekend – and we’re excited, because for the first time since 2019 the event will be held face-to-face as well as online. Sci Foo, as it’s known, is an “unconference” with no fixed agenda, and brings together researchers, innovators, technologists, communicators and policy makers from around the world who are doing groundbreaking work in diverse areas of science and technology. Attendance is by invitation only. Image: A sketch by Alex Cagan of some of the Digital Science Sci Foo 2019 crew. Since the first event in 2006, Sci Foo has aimed to do things differently. Tim O’Reilly, of O’Reilly Media, had created a format to bring together thinkers from different fields in the Friends of O’Reilly ( FOO ) Camp format, but it was Linda Stone who suggested that Timo Hannay (of Nature), Chris DiBona (of Google) and Tim should come together in creating a camp that brought comp