International Development and Research Capacities: Increasing Access to African Scholarly Publishing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the evolving relationship between Canada and the African academic research community through the promotion of a concept known as Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) and with an eye to its implications for increasing the circulation of research through such means as open access (OA) publishing models. We analyze the programmatic discourse of Canada’s International Development Research Centre’s (IDRC) African research initiatives, and report on an IDRC research and development project assessing the means of increasing access to African scholarly journals through the use of open source software platforms and open access publishing and archiving models. Consistent with IDRC’s multi-year effort to contribute directly to university-based research capacities by investing in ICT infrastructure in Africa, our survey of African editors, librarians, and faculty from five African nations reveals a similar interest in developing those capacities, despite numerous challenges, through the use of online publishing systems and OA publishing models, which hold some promise of increasing access to research published in Africa.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.063 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".