Building open reviewing and publishing capacity in African public health researchers
Funding Area: Capacity building / Construcción de capacidad
Problem Statement: We aim to pilot an educational programme to build capacity among early and mid-career African public health scientists in open peer review and publishing. The group will be mentored through participation in two online open access courses in peer review and open science, and the publication and open review of preprints on an open access platform. There is a need for local research in Africa to augment the evidence base for policy development. This is particularly the case for public health, where there is an expanding but underpopulated evidence base of peer reviewed literature to drive improvements in population health. Many African countries have no health journals or only one. A survey by PublicHealth.Africa found 174 journals likely to publish articles on public health in 13 African countries. Most journals had low external credibility as they were not openly licenced or indexed in scholarly search engines, although most were freely available for readers to download. A subsequent survey on Open Science in African Public Health led by PublicHealth.Africa, included 91 respondents (teachers, researchers, editors and publishers) from 16 countries. Knowledge of open access publishing was mixed. Two thirds expressed a desire to join a mentoring programme and to have access to relevant online courses. Thus, we have demonstrated an expressed need for education and support to improve the quality of African public health journals and open access to the results of research.
Proposed Activities: Activity 1. Provide a platform and access to open online courses A free-standing open access Moodle platform has been created by Peoples-Praxis in partnership with PublicHealth.Africa at https://courses.peoples-praxis.org/. Online courses have been developed in Moodle and published under CC licences. The category of relevance is ‘Publishing, reviewing and appraising’ of which Peer review, and Open Science are key. Expertise, resources and timeline. IT support and software development to refine the courses, ensure that they are appropriately set up to enrol the cohort of early career researchers and offer certification of course completion. November 2023 to January 2024. Activity 2. Offer online mentoring to build capacity among African researchers for peer review and open science publishing. Two journals - Global Health Action and the International Journal of Epidemiology will help identify mentors, who will include experienced African public health researchers as mentors. A cohort of early to mid-career African researchers (as mentees) will be identified by PublicHealth.africa and others. Mentors will guide the members of this cohort through the courses described above. An exercise as part of this activity will be for participants to post and review preprints on the platform described in Activity 3 below. Expertise, resources and timeline Recruit mentors and develop the final protocol for programme in November and December 2023. Cohort of early career African researchers assembled in January and February 2024. Students mentored through the courses in March and April 2024. Evaluation will be through qualitative feedback from participants and course completion. IT support, coordinator support and honoraria for mentors required. Activity 3. Provide a platform for posting pre-prints and open peer review Preliminary work has begun with developing the preprint and open review use cases on the flexible open source publishing platform Kotahi. Each of the participants in the programme will be asked to post a preprint to the platform so that it is open for view by others, to post an open review of another participant’s paper, and to respond to comments on their own post. Mentors will assess both the reviews and the responses. Certificates will be awarded following assessment of reviewing competence. Expertise, resources and timeline The Kotahi-based platform will be deployed in the PublicHealth.Africa domain from November 2023 to January 2024. The platform will be used as part of the programme during May and June 2024. As for Activity 2, evaluation will be through qualitative feedback from participants and evidence of course completion. This will be completed in time for a presentation to the Ubuntu Alliance in November 2024. IT support and software development for the platform; coordinator support
Openness: Openness is central to each aspect of this work. The courses are all open access with Creative Commons licences and the preprint and open reviewing platform are also open access and open-source. The work that has been undertaken to develop this idea, as well as the surveys performed by PublicHealth.Africa have been steered by a group including representatives of other initiatives that have been undertaken to increase open science and knowledge exchange including LIBSENSE, EIFL, WACREN, AJoL. The group already has one publication in the peer reviewed literature https://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.605 and another under review, and we will expect to publish this experience also. Once we have the information from this pilot, we will explore ways to develop capacity more broadly for the open publication of African research.
Challenges: With the pressures that people are facing in their everyday lives and work, finding both mentors with the ability and time to commit to this programme and participants who want to build their skills will be a challenge. Engagement with a novel form of journal publication, and embracing the concept that your work and reviews are fully open to scrutiny may be a challenge. We do not foresee a technical challenge in the development of the platform. But have experience of unreliable internet access for public health staff in isolated areas - this may limit their ability to fully use Moodle courses and participate in mentoring sessions. Financial sustainability of this line of work will be a challenge - this is the argument that journal publishers make for needing to charge high Article Processing Charges for open access to their publication.
Neglectedness: We have not applied for other funding for this work, but having the results from this pilot project would potentially unlock other funding opportunities. We are early in our work in this area, and having performed two needs surveys are now ready to pilot the work proposed here. For this reason we have not yet explored other funding sources, but will be doing so.
Success: Establishment of easily accessible, open and usable community-driven platforms for course delivery, mentorship, posting of preprints and providing open reviews. A cohort of African early career researchers in public health who completed the programme and are shown to have the capacity for high quality reviews of journal articles, as well as being attuned to the benefits of open publication of research findings.
Total Budget: 25,000
Budget File: pdf
Affiliations: This application is submitted on behalf of Peoples-Praxis https://www.peoples-praxis.org/ (registered as a charity in the UK and who would administer the funds) and PublicHealth.Africa https://www.publichealth.africa/ (‘Building Public Health Capacity in Africa’, established by Alumni of Peoples-uni, which itself was an online global public health capacity building programme)
LMIE Carveout: This programme is targeted at African researchers and the publication of their work, with a focus on public health. It is designed to help correct the problem of publishing LMIE research in the current publishing climate, and to build local capacity for this. The funding is to be routed through Peoples-Praxis https://peoples-praxis.org/, a UK based charity. However all project activities will be online. IT support and the provision of the IT infrastructure will come from Datasphir which is based in Lagos. Mentors will come from both the Global North and South and all of the participants of the early career research cohort will be Africa based. The outcomes of this program will be readily extrapolated to other LMICs globally.
Team Skills: Members of this team have experience of working together especially in the context of an online public health capacity building programme aimed at LMIE health professionals https://www.peoples-uni.org/. Datasphir provided the IT leadership and support for Peoples-uni, and worked productively with members of the team here to produce a successful programme over 15 years. We span public health academics with expertise in course development and delivery for LMIE populations, and IT experts with experience of support for education and research in Africa through NRENs. We each have experience in academic publishing and are committed to the open access movement. Members of the team have also worked together to publish the results of our survey (described above) in an open access journal https://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.605 (with the second submitted for publication).
How Did You Hear About This Call: Word of mouth (e.g. conversations and emails from IOI staff, friends, colleagues, etc.) / Boca a boca (por ejemplo, conversaciones y correos electrónicos del personal del IOI, amigos, colegas, etc.)
Submission Number: 94
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