Africa's contribution to the global open access literature

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.