The Network of African Science Academies (NASAC) in collaboration with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) recently held a ‘Consultative Forum on Open Access: Towards high level interventions for research and development in Africa’ in Nairobi, Kenya, on 29-30 January 2015.

Michelle Willmers, former Programme Manager of the Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme and current Project Manager of the Open Data Africa Initiative in the UCT IP Unit, was one of the scholarly communication experts invited to present in the forum. The two-day meeting drew together senior representatives from African science academies and was intended as a springboard to consolidate and promote a regional approach in advancing the Open Access agenda in Africa. The discussion covered a wide range of scholarly communication issues, ranging from new approaches to journal publishing and peer review to curation and intellectual property.

Questions around intellectual property, rights management and patenting are of central importance in the local debate around Open Access as many African institutions straddle the space between new open approaches and traditional more closed systems of practice. The need to consolidate efforts at regional level and lobby government for support and engagement with Open Access issues was one of the principle recommendations emerging from the forum.

The full set of final Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP) outputs (including useful briefing papers on various aspects of Open Access) can be accessed here.