 Okay. Hi everybody. Welcome to this webinar on Africa, a preprint service for African researchers. We are lucky enough to be joined today by a number of the advisory board and co-founders of Africa. We'll be telling you more about the service, who it's useful for and how. I am Ian Sullivan. I'm from the Center for Open Science. We help provide the infrastructure for Africa, and I'll be introducing things a little bit today. So I am from the Center for Open Science, as I mentioned. We are a nonprofit that's run out of Virginia over in the United States. Our mission is to help increase the openness, reproducibility, and integrity of scientific research. And part of how we fulfill that mission is to help support communities like the one behind Africa. So we are recording this webinar at the moment. Our intent is to share that online for people who are not able to make it today and get at least a translation into French to help spread the word inside some of the Francophone communities. If you have questions at any point during the presentation, feel free to use the Zoom question and answer tool that should be available to you. If you have questions afterwards, you can always email contact at cos.il or info at africive.org. So with that, I will hand things over to our steering committee who can walk you through a little bit more of the details about the service. Okay. Welcome everybody. We're hoping that Justin can do the introductions. Justin? Yeah, hi everybody. And welcome all to this AfricaCiv webinar. So we're going to talk about this African repository for African scientists. So they are the steering committee of AfricaCiv. I'm Justin, I'm Justin Aino from University of Paraguay, Benin, and I'm co-founder of AfricaCiv. And we have here Oba Seymonte-Kena. He's at Filsquay Global. It's a tech hub based in Lagos, Nigeria, right? And we also have Joe Havman, Joanna Havman from Access to Perspective in Germany. So also with Jan from the Center of Open Science, we're going to discuss about how footprints are useful for scientists in Africa and how AfricaCiv can help make African content on the scientific web being more visible. So that's all, Joe. Okay. I'm sharing my screen. Or you can just navigate for me. It would be great. Okay. Just a quick outline of what we're going to talk about. So I'll just briefly mention what is a preprint for whomever doesn't know what it is. Why do we need a preprint repository for Africa at all? Who can submit to AfricaCiv and then Justin will talk more about African languages and how these relate to AfricaCiv and why we think it's important. Then Oba is going to introduce you to the uploading and submission process on the archive. And then Ian will conclude on a few more notes on what the Open Science framework can do for you. So starting. So this is basically, if you go to the website, africarchive.org, this is the screen that you see. And then on the next slide, this is basically, africarchive is one of a growing number of specialized repositories specialized either for their discipline covering psychology or marine biology or marine research more generally and also regional repositories such as africarchive for Africa, but there's also one for Indonesian research output and Arab archives covering all the Arabic research topics and also research output from Arabic speaking countries basically and Arabic as a language. So what is a preprint to start with? It's basically the version of a manuscript that you also would submit to a journal for peer review and for publication and peer review journal. But it's also like put on a manuscript on a preprint repository like Africa archive or any of the others. And this can also be the repository of your university or your own website makes it available for the general public, but also for other researchers before the publication process is completed. And this can be interesting because the publication process and the whole peer review process can sometimes take a couple of months or up to three or five years in some cases. And this obviously would delay and also hinder the communication possibilities of your research output and you won't be able to communicate what you're working on in a timely manner. So that is why people increasingly upload their manuscripts, so called preprints on repositories such as the one that we are hosting together with. Yeah. Okay. What are the benefits of preprints? Why should we publish your preprints? First of all, it's open access so you can obviously share with the Global Research Committee what you're working on and also get feedback on your work. So you can actually improve, submit an improved version for peer review in a journal, yeah, in a research journal if you also wish. This entrant will accelerate your scientific progress and there have been studies that showed that citation rate increases by around 30% if you also publish your preprints with any other publications or for peer review. And this entrant again will also help you with your reputation building. So basically you will be known globally in your field of expertise as a researcher. But why do we need this specifically for Africa? Maybe there's also something that me as obviously a non-African found out with talking to my colleagues and I'm sure that Justin and Oba can agree with me that we need more visibility for African research output and therefore also increase collaboration across continents also to let the rest of the science community know what African scientists are working on, especially as we're tackling global challenges such as migration and climate change and sustainable use of natural resources and so on and so forth. So with this in mind there is not only a need but also demand for us to work closer together and again to make the research output from the African country more visible and to engage African scientists in the global discourse on research topics. And what this platform also, what we are hoping will also increase is interdisciplinary research. So by choosing the topic of Africa or by implementing a repository for African scientists irrespective of their discipline, we want to trigger interdisciplinary research that people learn, people who study natural sciences also learn about approaches and questions that are being asked in immunities and social sciences. Okay so basically we approach obviously African scientists, those who are working on the African continent but also those who work at the host institute outside Africa because this is also about visibility of African scientists per se. We also encourage submissions from non-African scientists to report on research conducted on African territory so that they can also engage in collaboration with African researchers that they probably didn't know before. And we hope that non-African scientists who already collaborate with African scientists will upload manuscripts with African co-authors. So that's why that note is also listed. And we also approach non-African scientists who report on research relevant to African affairs so that whatever is related to Africa or African topics. And yeah so that's we engage in interdisciplinary and also intercontinental discussions here. Yeah so this is also again why a preprint and why a preprint repository. So by uploading your work to Africa archive in the African context, you have the opportunity to disseminate your work free and free of charge and quickly and engage in the global discussion before you publish your work in a peer review journal. All articles and manuscripts will be granted with a Creative Commons license and digital object identifier and are also indexed in Google Scholar. What's important to note is that if you want to refer to a preprint manuscript and especially if you want to cite it in your peer with article, then you should clearly mark the preprint status so you can just add the note like this is a preprint. And there's also standards being developed how to mark preprints properly. But also by adding the German Africa archive and OSF, Open Science Framework, will eventually also be enough once the concept is clear and obvious and more widely used. And this will be clear enough to state this is a preprint version of an article. Having said that, that is important to know that preprints are not formally peer reviewed and this is one of the major concerns that people may have, but it shouldn't be a concern or which again has been checked and scientifically tested. Usually the quality of preprints is almost as high or comparably high as published articles and peer reviewed journals. But you should keep in mind that there's not a formal peer review process in place. Again, it's about making research output visible and opening discussions and you can also submit new updated versions of your manuscript so the manuscript can also grow in quality over time on the preprint repository. But Ian might talk more about this in more detail. Yeah, so preprints are open access and we also want to state that you should obviously still continue aiming to publish and peer reviewed journals as long as this is the measure for the global scientific discourse. It's at this stage where we are in the open science discussion is another means to communicate your research output and also referring back to all the benefits that come with preprint manuscripts and their discussion. Yeah, we are basically in a changing world and yeah, we don't want to discourage you from publishing a peer reviewed journal as yet as where we are now for and probably for the next couple of months and years. You can check or you should also check if you plan to publish in a peer review journal if the journal of your choice is open for having the preprint manuscript published before layout thing. And you can do that in the shepherd Romeo service which we will provide the link to in the chat and also in the follow up. In the description of this video as a follow up for the seminar or webinar. But just a quick notes around 80 or 82% of all journals that are published in English globally do accept and acknowledge your publication of the preprint manuscript. So, in most cases you're on the same side but to double check you should go to the shepherd Romeo service or to the open access policy of your journal. So yeah, so these are the types of manuscripts that we encourage you to submit to Africa archive obviously manuscripts for research articles can also be the manuscripts of review papers project proposals case studies of any kind. Very important. And this is also the place for negative or non results, meaning those results that do not support a support a hypothesis. And this is normally very difficult to get published in a peer reviewed journal. You can also submit data sets and methods papers, technical notes and description papers. You can also submit anything else that relates to research output or is or can be seen as research output and then we will decide on an individual individual basis and we will also get in touch with your if we have further questions. Yeah, we're important as and this is more of just as part to discuss as we accept translations of any of the above types of manuscripts. So if you submit in a in a language is different from English or French. Um, then whoever feels happy to and skilled enough to translate to another language then we'd be very happy for you to contribute with that. Okay, nice. Justin. Thank you. So when we start with Africa seems people asked why we decided to accept some mission in local language in Africa. So people ask that and when they know that the formula, the classic way to share documentation or to share purpose is either in English or in French, depending on the area of the globe where you are, but we decided to share our content. Both in these language, I mean English and French, but also in African local language. So how to know that there's about 2000 local which that spoken in Africa in the whole continent. And there are some countries, some government of some country that decided to invest themselves more on the promotion of local language. So countries such as Senegal and in Senegal, they decided to use the one of the most spoken local language. I mean, Wolof has a national language or an official language and in Nigeria also in Kenya. So this country decided to invest more in promoting local language in that country. So it's because there was this that local language have a very big potential for disseminate information or disseminate content in Africa in the research community in Africa. Because a language that most of people or many people speak is more able to reach its aims. So since in Africa, more people speak local language, it will be more easy to share knowledge or to share content in this language. So people are able or inclined to share their knowledge if they have opportunity, something like a code that say that you can forget everything you can forget, everything you learn, everything you do during your life, but there's something you can never forget. It's your mother tongue. It's your mother language. So that's very important. And in the bottom of the slide, there is a link to an article or maybe see Africa explaining how local language are very important in science for the continent. So yeah, please. Thanks. So on Africa, see if people or users can decide to submit their articles, the whole articles or just the summary of the article or either the data sets they want to submit in local language as so I leave you by Igbo Africans Wolof that I talk about now and for that say a local language in my country being and any other language of Africa. And to promote this, since we noticed that from now, from the starting of Africa safe to now, more users have been decided yet to submit their articles in local language. We decided to plan a workshop on Republica in next December in Accra to encourage people to submit their articles in local language. So we decided to plan a workshop for translating some of contents, one or two articles that are already published on Africa's in a local language in one or two local two different local languages. So There's a submission guide link, which outlines details, FAQs on how to navigate through challenges while submitting your preprint. You can also you could check the link. It has A number of just cases which you could go through. So the first thing is to Go to Africa safe.com and sign up. When you sign up, it brings you to this page where you have your full name. Email You confirm the email and a password. And then you accept the terms and conditions. And then of course you select The verification part of the sign up here and then you click create accounts. And then you come back to this page after you must have verified your email. You come back here to the main page and then you can click on a preprint. When you click a preprint, it brings you to this page where you can upload your file and give a title to your paper. So you could use the same title of the paper as the main title of the file here and then you save and continue. The next page brings you to choose the discipline and sub-disciplines for your paper. So you can pick from a wide range of disciplines from business, education, engineering, law and many others like that. And then you can click, you can select sub-disciplines on that. For instance, if you take social and liberal science, you could select sub-disciplines under that, which could be sociologies, social statistics, spot studies. And then you could also now select what wider range discipline has to be educational psychology. So if you select psychology, you could select educational psychology or sociology or that. Then you click save and continue. Then the next page has to do is you are choosing a license adding the abstract, tags and publication dates. So you could copy and paste your abstract from your paper directly into the abstract box. And then you could also select the license, which you want. So most preprints uploaded on the platform are licensed under the CC. But we also have other licenses there, which you could go through. We have a list of them that you could go through there. Then you could also check to, if you have a D, if you know the DOI, you could also include the DOI. If you don't, it's optional. And then the publication dates, that if you've published it, you could also select that and also include random keywords that have to do with the paper. If it's educational sociology, for instance, you could select education, sociology, human behavior as tags. And you got as many tags as possible on the keywords section. And then you click save and continue. And then you could, so you click save and continue. And you go to the next page, which has to do with adding the authors of the paper. So you could have other people on the platform who have uploaded preprints, who are also co-authors on your own paper. You could also add them as authors so that directly under your paper, you have more, you have those people listed there and people could also check out the papers they've also published. So you add that under there and then you click submit. And directly under, once you click submit, it goes through, so we provide a kind of reviewing process whereby it goes through, we use the pre-moderation approach whereby we have moderators who can go through it and check for it to make sure it's best fit for the platform. And it's in line with all the guidelines for the platform. And then once it passes through that, it's verified. And then you get an email saying your paper is now public. And that's all basically. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So basically just to conclude, here are all our social channels, the websites. We're now redirect you to the OSF platform where you can directly submit your manuscripts. Then we're also on Twitter, Facebook. There's also Facebook discussion group if you want to join that and discuss with the community. We have a LinkedIn account and we are also working on GitHub. So if you want to join the team, you're most welcome to do so in GitHub as well. So yeah, just get in touch with us and let's take this to the next level. And also obviously share the word with your communities and upload your own work and that of your colleagues. All right. Thank you very much. So keen observers will have noted on that submit slide that there's the option to use an OSF project to manage supplemental materials and data appendices and so forth. I'm going to show you what that actually is and give you an idea of some of the capabilities that are also available to you if you submit your work to Africa. So I will show you this. Okay, so behind Africa is open research management and collaboration tool called OSF, the open science framework. When you submit manuscript or data set or any material to Africa in the background on OSF project is being created to host those materials and make them available for you for future updating and expansion. You can also use OSF before you get to the manuscript stage. If you're looking for a tool to make it easier to support the same kinds of international and multi discipline collaborations that Joe mentioned at the beginning. OSF is open to all disciplines in all regions so that it's an easy way to collaborate with people across institutional and national boundaries. I'll give you a quick tour of OSF. So when you create an account to submit your manuscript to Africa it's actually an OSF account so you can use the same one if you just go to osf.io and hit sign in. That same username and password will work for you. Here I have it knows who I am so it does not ask me for a password. And here I have a collection of my most recent projects. I'm just going to create a new project to show you what that looks like. Create new project and I can just add a nice description and hit create and then I will go to my new project. So I mentioned that OSF is a general purpose research management and collaboration tool. This is what all projects start out looking like. If you add some additional materials to your Africa preprint you'll get a project that looks just like this with a big link up at the top that points people at the preprint. On the preprint page there will also be a link that points people at this project so that there's a nice tight coupling between the two areas and anyone who gets to your preprint can always find the supplemental materials and so forth. OSF gives you a couple of basic tools to use in collaborating. To start with there's a wiki that you can use to help people navigate all of the materials that you've posted or that you're interested in sharing get a better understanding of your research. As it goes forward there's a file section you can just upload whatever type of files you want. Data files, appendices, anything related to your research. This is a great thing to use prospectively if you're starting your research and want to share and collaborate with people that may not all be using the same tools. You can add some additional structure to your project with components so I might create a data component. That component will get its own unique identifier and can have files inside it as well so that it's a nice straightforward place to point people to the specific file that I want to reference in my paper or the specific data. That's a great data set that I want to share with my colleagues. It's useful also to take a look at what this looks like once you've actually completed a study and decided to make it public. So I'm going to show you an example public one. So this is a paper that was published back in 2013. This is connected to an open access publication that came out at the same time inside the wiki. It explains both the research and the supplemental materials that are available here. In this case the publication was about calculating effect size and so the files that he's made available are spreadsheets specifically to make calculating those effect sizes as he suggests as easy as possible for researchers. You can see over here in the recent activity list that even though this paper went up in 2013 he's continued to update the supplemental materials till around this time last year. So this is a great way to give your research and the research outputs continued life and demonstrate their continued impact on the field above and beyond when you get the manuscript published or you make it available. So this is a great way with making data and materials available getting your preprint out there to increase the speed of your knowledge dissemination and then by continuing to update any of the materials that are relevant. You can also extend the window of impact for that publication into the foreseeable future as long as your data and other research outputs are continuing to inspire and fuel new development of ideas. You can continue to promote them and you see here we have a nice little citation tool that's built in so that anyone who comes to this page just like when they come to your preprint page is going to see the list of authors and know how to give you the recognition and citation that you deserve. So with that, I think I'll just see if anyone has some questions. I think there's anything else that our panelists would like to share. Are there any questions so far at all. Anything to add. Julien. I saw you in the audience. Do you have any questions? Julien Horin? You can also comment if you think this is a good idea or how do you think we should improve. Here's a question by Dina. If you submit a manuscript to Africa Archive, is there a need to create a corresponding project on OSF? That's basically one step. As you submit, it creates a project, right? Yes. As soon as you hit submit, it creates that project in the background for you. So if you're already at the point where you have a manuscript, you don't have to worry about creating an OSF project. You can go straight to the Africa website. If you want to use OSF as a way to manage and your research and collaborations while you're performing them, there's an easy way to link that existing project in the submission form on Africa. Either way, there'll only be one project created. Another question is how many preprints? So far we have 20 manuscripts, 20 individual projects on Africa Archive, which is quite a decent start for we're now like two months into the extents we started. And the growth, yeah, but there's room for more obviously. So if you have any manuscripts you want to submit, just go ahead. Also another question probably could be interesting. People kept asking as we introduce also other repositories apart from Africa Archive, we usually suggest that you can submit your manuscripts to also any of the others. It's not meant to compete with any of the other prefront repositories. But the question obviously is how much sense does that make in the long run because as you update the version of your manuscripts, you might need to update that on also the other repositories. And is there the plan and idea? I think we spoke about this, but maybe for the audience to connect the repositories on the open science framework with each other so that you can just take the repository where I think your manuscript belongs to. I'm not sure most of the repositories that exist there already, the different preprint communities have been relatively exclusive because they were very discipline specific. So the language and region specific ones are all part of a new wave that started in the last year or so. So I'm sure as we run into situations where people are members of multiple communities and want to share the research that way, that's something that we'll be working on more in the future. Okay. Okay. Other questions or comments? And Justin, do you want to add anything? Okay. Yeah, move on with that. Okay. So I just wanted to talk about the multi-language on the platform. You can upload any language and you can upload your preprints in any language. If you're comfortable with doing your research work in your local language, you could upload in that same local language. And also, it doesn't have to be published. It doesn't have to be peer reviewed yet. You could be running a background proposal or rough research and you don't have all the pieces yet together, but you have the basic flow of what your research is going to be about. So you could also put that out on the preprint service. Yeah. Justin. Okay. Just to comment about what Jun said. People don't have just to... It doesn't mean that if you submit your paper on AfricaSafe, you can't submit it on another repository. So as we said, AfricaSafe is an important repository. When you submit your work, you can even submit it in a, let's say, classical journal for peer review. So we have something like a flexibility with other source of content. So, okay, thanks. Jun, want to add something? Other than, like as Ian presented the open science framework in more detail, we just figured that maybe we use it as a project management tool, which you, like in the audience, everybody's welcome to do. And that's what it meant, what it's meant for, for science project management. And maybe we can also use it for the further development of the Africa Archive repository. So you might find a link in one of our communications in the next couple of weeks. And yeah, you're most welcome to join that discussion as well, because it's open, obviously. So again, any comments on the ideation, on like the submission guidelines, if you think we missed a point, please approach us or comment in the document yourself. And yeah, we welcome also other team members. This is a volunteer project, maybe it's also important to note. So we do this as a volunteer effort. And it's a lot of work, but it's fun because we think it's important. And it gives like, yeah, we hope we'll be contributing in a useful manner. So and if you want to join us, you must welcome do this. All right. Thanks very much. Go ahead. Yeah. Okay. Yes. So also, if you've published your paper in another journal, you could also put it up on the platform. You only need to confirm from the DOI if you have the license to share it on the open preprint service like this platform. So you need to confirm that. But of course, if you've published in a different journal in a different on a different platform, you can also put it on this platform. So we had a comment from Julian about doing project management in local languages and then submitting after that to field specialized repository in English or to English language publications. I think that's a great point. The OSF portion that I mentioned for project management, it's important to point out that if you go to OSF and create a project that is private by default. So you have to actively add other contributors in order for them to have access to it. You then have the capability to make some of that project public later on to share your data or your materials, etc. If you submit to Africa because that's a publication venue, the project that's going to be created for you is public by default. And so that's specifically about sharing and publishing the materials, but you're right that you absolutely can use the same tools for private collaboration in whichever language is most appropriate to your collaboration. And then share that either in that language on Africa in a specific field related repository in English in all of the above. So if we don't have any other questions, I just wanted to thank everyone for joining us and for putting in all the work to get Africa and the community around it off the ground. And just encourage everyone to spread the word to other researchers that you know that are doing work in and around and with African researchers. Thank you very much.