Abstract:
This study was conducted to determine the contribution of Africa to the global open access
literature. Data were extracted from the Directory of Open Access Repository (OpenDOAR). The
findings indicate that only 22 (40.74%) African countries contributed 155 OA repositories in the
OpenDOAR. Most of these repositories were from South Africa (33; 21.29%), Kenya (28;
18.06%) and Nigeria (21; 13.55%). Africa contributed 1,024,851 documents in the OpenDOAR,
with Egypt and South Africa contributing nearly two thirds (634,025; 61.2%) of these
documents. Despite its large size, the African continent had only 4.52% of the OA repositories
and 0.14% of documents in the OpenDOAR. The average number of documents per repository in
Africa was only 6,611.94 as compared to other continents such as Australasia (752,094.80
documents), Europe (342,896.64 documents) and North America (201,997.12 documents). The
top 25 OA repositories in Africa contributed 820,574 documents, which is over 80% of the total
African contribution to the OpenDOAR. Most OA repositories in Africa contained journal
articles (74.84%) and they were multidisciplinary (61.73%). Overall, Africa’s contribution to the
global open access literature is still very low. Efforts should be strengthened to increase the level
of research and publication productivity as well as increase the capacity of institutions to
develop OA repositories.
