Consortium of Uganda University Libraries (CUUL) and The Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM) will host an open access (OA) workshop for agricultural scientists and professionals to discuss agricultural research dissemination and how to maximize visibility and impact of research output.

Prof. Mary Abukutsa-Onyango, Professor of Horticulture at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT, Kenya), will give the key-note speech. Prof. Abukutsa-Onyango has been a driving force behind the JKUAT open access mandate and her contribution was very valuable when the University of Nairobi was discussing its open access mandate.

Prof. Abukutsa-Onyango is also a treasurer at African women in science and engineering, and involved in International Society of Horticultural Science, African Crop Science Society, Agricultural Society of Kenya, Horticultural association of Kenya, Kenya Professional Association of Women in Agriculture and Environment. She received a number of awards including the President of the Republic of Kenya Award.

Leslie Chan recorded a short video with her where she discusses the challenges she faced when trying to publish her original research on African Indigenous Vegetables in international journals. She also talked about the importance of open access journals in Africa in ensuring that important research relevant to the continent are being published, read, and applied as well as the implications of open access for development in African countries.

Dr. Paul Nampala, RUFORUM Program Manager, will talk about OA publishing and African Crop Science Journal as a case study. And Joan Apio and Nodumo Dhlamini, RUFORUM Program Manager, will present RUFORUM OA repository.

And Thembani Malapela, AIMS (Agricultural Information Management Standards) of FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) will also contribute to the workshop. AIMS supports and disseminate standards, tools, methodologies and best practices to agricultural stakeholders to help them access agricultural research data and information. AIMS team does this in two interlinked platforms CIARD ( focusing on advocacy and policy support) and AIMS (providing technical support in standards,tools and methodologies). Furthermore, the AIMS team provides resources and through Webinars@AIMS that build capacity in standards, tools, methodologies in support to openness (open data and open access) in the agricultural domain. In this meeting Thembani will share some of the initiatives that  the participants can find of greater use to the open access campaigns, see his presentation (slideshare.net/faoaims/aims-eiflpresentation2014) here.

The event is a part of the project “Open access: Knowledge sharing and sustainable scholarly communication in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda” funded by Spider, the Swedish Program for ICT in Developing Regions DSV, Department of Computer and System Sciences, Stockholm University. 

For more information about the workshop, please contact EIFL country coordinator in Uganda Judith Nannozi at judith.nannozi [at] gmail.com.

For more information about EIFL’s OA work in Uganda, contact EIFL-OA Programme Manager, Iryna Kuchma, at iryna.kuchma [at] eifl.net.