Setting up African Scholarly Multi-stakeholder Consortia 

A bilateral consortial approach by AfricArXiv within the ORCID Global Participation Program, Funding cycle 1

For any comments or questions please email us at [email protected] or book a 15min Zoom call via calendly.com/africarxiv/ask-us-anything.

Objectives

• Bringing stakeholders together to identify interventions to close the gaps and challenges that have prevented wider adoption of ORCID and other PIDs across Africa.

• Providing institutional membership via a regional consortium led by UbuntuNet Alliance 

  • Pricing options

    • Each country counts as measured by its purchase power and classification as low/middle/high-income country; See https://info.orcid.org/membership/our-fee-principles/ 

    • Flat fee for the consortium with fixed pricing for at least 3 years

• Measurable and significant uptake of ORCID individual/institutional signups in the region

• Adding PIDs for OA and OD recommendations into national/institutional policies

• Increased discoverability of African research output via project dashboard and through our partners COKI, The Lens, ORCID dashboard, IRs, …

Benefits for participating institutions

• Institutional reputation building; a.o. by registering a ROR identifier 

• Owning the narrative about scientometrics coming out of their institution

• Value for money, i.e. “pricing scheme” via the consortium and affiliated services

Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

• List of events held

  • List of institutions/countries represented by participants in the events

• Number of members (min 60) of the ORCID consortium

• Number and metrics of relevant documents/data discoverable through AfricArXiv

Activities

• Setting up PID Info Portal

• Setting up virtual labs (sandboxes)

• Webinars and workshops  (online)

  • Technical aspects of scholarly repositories

  • National and institutional scope for scientometrics

  • Persistent identifiers

  • ORCID API and integration

  • Content will be made available in a long-term openly accessible Online academy

  • Informing policy for aspects of PID, OA, OS

  • Co-facilitated webinars with partners and scholarly services (ORCID, ROR, DataCite, CrossRef, LIBSENSE, …

• Biweekly Q&A

• Close collaboration with 

  • other grantees

  • inter-continental 

  • globally

  • South-South collaboration with actors in Latin America and Asia
    
    

Deliverables

• Concept note for consortial pricing informed by specific needs and capacity analysis (report appendix)

• Online resource library (in 4 languages en, fr, ar, pt) including:

  • Bite-sized video tutorials

    • Checklists

  • webinar recordings

  • installation guides

    • Recommendation for minimal viable PID setup

    • DSpace upgrade and maintenance

  • Repository comparison: Repository-options-compared_[AfricArXiv]

    • Virtual lab (Sandbox) for repository setup and customization

    • API / Integrations