Towards Internationalizing Nigeria Journals: Developing Implementation and Training Guidelines for Librarians and Journal Editors
Funding Area: Capacity building / Construcción de capacidad
Problem Statement: Numerous journals exist in Nigeria that contain research findings that can positively contribute to national development especially the building of a knowledge economy. These journals can also be indexed in international bibliographic databases to accurately capture Nigeria’s contribution to global scholarship. However, the majority of these journals that should have benefited the country and the global knowledge community lack web presence on the one hand, as they are housed on the open shelves of libraries or offices of their editors/publishers. On the other hand, many of the few journals that have web presence lacks the appropriate technologies to maintain their existence. As a result, the journals seem to be non-existent, and it appears that the journals have a very low return on investment. This also negatively impact global research metrics that ranked Africa as contributing less than 1% of global scholarly output mainly because of these issues. This proposal aims to address the significant gap by launching a national awareness campaign and developing capacity in the necessary technologies to internationalize and sustain Nigerian journals. Academic librarians in related line of practice or library information technology staff and editors/editorial staff of scholarly journals owned by Nigerian higher educational institutions (universities, polytechnics and colleges of education or research institutes) or learned societies are the target group for this project.
Proposed Activities: Our programme will run for a period of two years beginning in December 2023 to November 2025 as outlined below: A. Installation, customization and hosting of OJS and demonstration journals (2months- December 2023 to January 2024; Content developers and OJS experts). B. Creating documented guidelines for implementing and using the latest version of OJS in Nigerian specific context in both print and electronic forms (6 months- February- July 2024; Content developers, copyrighters and OJS experts). A Wiki site will be created for the online version which will serve as online community for OJS users in Nigeria. C. Nationwide OJS implementation training workshops for academic librarians and journal editors (12 months; experts in the installation and administration of OJS and trainers). Note 1: Nigeria is a large country that is divided into 6 geopolitical zones: south-west, south- east, south-south, north-central, north-east and north-west. Each of the zones comprises of minimum of 5 states of culturally related tribes totaling 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). Travel time to a central part of each zone may not exceed average of 4-6hours by road. Therefore, for ease of access and closer mobilization of people, we intend to host 6 training workshops over a period of 12 months at 2 monthly intervals between successive training workshops as follow: i. North-East (Gombe, Gombe State): August 2024 ii. North-West (Kaduna, Kaduna State): October 2024 iii. North-Central (Abuja, FCT): December 2024 iv. South-South (Port-Harcourt, Rivers State): February 2025 v. South-East (Enugu, Enugu State): April 2025 vi. South-West (Ado-Ekiti, Ekiti State): June 2025 Note 2: We intend to have local contact persons in each of the zones to coordinate local publicity, venue arrangement, refreshments and other logistics. Note 3: Each workshop will be livestreamed to the larger public and stored for future view on YouTube and Facebook. Note 4: An audience of 100-150 people will be targeted as physical attendees in each of the zones with a total of about 900 people expected in all. Note 5: The expected audience are academic librarians in related line of practice or library information technology staff and editors or editorial staff of scholarly journals owned by Nigerian higher educational institutions (universities, polytechnics and colleges of education or research institutes) or learned/professional societies. Note 6: Research data will be collected with the aid of questionnaire distributed at each of the training venues to ascertain pre and post workshop experience of participants with open access publishing and use of open journal system. D. Establishment of a community of practice to be named Nigerian National Platform for OJS (3 months- June to August 2025) E. Analysis of research data and report writing (3months-September to November 2025
Openness: Our project is open to the extent of the infrastructure under consideration, the targeted community who would be invited without further barrier of cost, ethnicity, institution type or any such thing except for the professional bracket and line of job practice already specified. The infrastructure, Open Journal System (OJS), is an open-source manuscript management software developed by the Public Knowledge Project based in Simon Fraser University and supported by the government of Canada. With over ten thousand usage across the world, OJS is the most widely used journal management system with powerful but flexible features “built to meet the needs of journals in every country, language and discipline.” Our project aimed to reach broader community through the extensive way it is structured to cover all the six geopolitical zones in Nigeria and by taking the capacity building training to places closest to target audience so as to eliminate marginalization and disinterest due to distance. We also plan to have the events recorded, stored and livestreamed to wider audience while creating permanent social media handles for the project as well as a community of practice for continued engagement after the grant life. The experiences from the project as well as data collected will be analyzed and shared in scholarly journals and conferences as well as active social media engagements during the project.
Challenges: The following challenges are anticipated: i. Fluctuating exchange rates affecting national inflation. This may have impacts on the budget and execution of the project. ii. Security challenges especially in certain part of the country. This may affect the programme calendar. iii. Unforeseen local or international engagement by any of the team members may affect the programme calendar. iv. Unforeseen personal challenges of any of the team members may have implication on the execution of the project. Notwithstanding, members of the team are people who have won grants with broad ranging experiences in project execution and are sure of minimizing the challenges to achieve optimum success.
Neglectedness: The Nigerian ‘Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND)’ recently launched a grant for journals to migrate online. It is however limited to journals of professional associations alone. We have not applied for the fund because the scope is different from the goals of our project. However, we foresee our project intersecting with the goal of TETFUND in that it will help benefitting journals to have the necessary information and knowledge on how to properly implement their online migration using a journal management system rather than generic content management systems commonly used by journals in the country.
Success: The proposed project will help domesticate Open Journal System in Nigeria, especially among Nigerian higher educational institutions and learned/professional societies. It will also help in promoting research, scholarly communications and quality of journal publication in Nigeria. It will enhance the capacity of librarians and journal managers to create a single window platform for the intellectual output of Nigeria universities. We hope to thus measure success by: i. Drastic increase in the number of Nigerian journals migrating online ii. Drastic increase in the adoption of OJS for management of Nigerian journals iii. Digitization and upload of journals’ back issues iv. Establishment and sustainability of the community of practice i.e. Nigerian National Platform for OJS v. Creation of the online wiki forum for Nigerian OJS users.
Total Budget: $21,895
Budget File: pdf
Affiliations: No
LMIE Carveout: Yes, our project fits within the LMIEs category. The project will be taking place 100% in Nigeria, a Low- and Middle- Income Economy (LMIE). All three team members are Nigerians who are actively resident in the country and work in Nigerian universities. The targeted users and participants of the project are actively based in Nigeria.
Team Skills: Idowu Adegbilero-Iwari (IA)- Scholarly Communications Librarian, Dr. Basiru Adetomiwa (BA)- Scholarly Communications/Engineering Liaison Librarian and Adekunle Oyadeyi (AO)- Electronic Information Resources Officer. The team comprises of practicing and experienced academic librarians in Nigerian universities, who have firsthand experience in the installation, administration and training of Open-source software. Our job roles include but are not limited to: scholarly communications, research assistance, e-resources management, database administration, information literacy and digital scholarship training facilitation. AO and IA manage their respective institution’s journal systems and are involved in OJS consultancy for other academic institutions and professional associations in Nigeria. They have successfully executed seven (7) OJS projects for universities and professional associations in the last two years. The OJS projects are online and functioning optimally. IA is experienced in ORCID API integration into journals as well as creation, registration and maintenance of Digital Object Identifier. IA and BA, respectively, have won internationally competitive grants e.g. INASP/UNESCO Open Access Grant, to organize capacity building events in the past. The team’s experience and expertise in OJS installation, administration, and training ditto broader scholarly communications issues in the Open Science era would be brought to bear for the success of the project.
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: 107
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