Transcript - Webinar series: Adoption of ORCID in Kenya, Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria, and across Africa

Ebuka:  Africarxiv is a community led digital archive for African research communication. By enhancing the visibility of African research, we enable discoverability and collaboration opportunities for African scientists on the continent as well as globally.

So today, we welcome four speakers.

The first speaker is going to be Lombe Tembo, who is responsible for improving equity and participation in ORCID in currently underrepresented areas, especially the global south. She's also responsible for growing membership and adoption in currently underrepresented regions whilst ensuring member satisfaction and value.

She has a BA in economics and an MA in development studies.

And then our second speaker is going to be Dr. Peninnah Musangi who is the university librarian and director at AMREF International University.

She also serves as the treasurer, a governing board of Kenya Libraries and Information Services Consortium. She has been instrumental in the development and implementation of institutional repositories and open access policies in various universities in Kenya.

And then our third speaker is going to be Cecile Coulibaly, who is coordinating the technical activities of the Digital Library for higher education and scientific research in Cote d'Ivoire as the deputy director in charge of the scientific Commission's at the Virtual University of Cote d'ivoire.

And then last but not least, our final speaker is going to be Owen Iyoha, who is the CEO of the Eko Konnect research and education initiative. He oversees infrastructure developments, capacity building, and advocacy with the goal of developing all aspects of research and Education Network, and its community in Nigeria.

Thank you all for coming. And now, over to you Lombe.

Lombe: Thank you so much for the introduction, Ebuka. So I'm just going to go right ahead and start presenting. So I'd like to talk about the global participation program as a whole. But I will start by talking about ORCID and what exactly it is. So ORCID is an independent nonprofit, open to participation by all the registry was launched in 2012. And it's guided by our values and founding principles. If you want to read a bit more about that, the slides will be shared. So that will be open to you. Also, it's committed to making fair open data available via our public API and also the annual public data file. So it ensures transparency by allowing any member to nominate a candidate for the board. And more information on this is available on the website.

So ORCID provides three main services and the first one as Jo mentioned earlier is the ORCID ID, which is a unique persistent identifier, which is free of charge to individual researchers. And then the second one is the ORCID record. And this one is a digital CV or a profile which is connected to the ORCID ID. And this can include employment education, funding, peer review, and other aspects that I will mention a bit later. And then thirdly, the ORCID APIs. And this is a set of application programming interfaces, services in support of communities of practice, which are then enabling interoperability between an ORCID record and other member organizations.

So with an ORCID ID researchers are uniquely identified and they have their research information accessible. I will share a few slides that will show this so the ability to disambiguate researchers is critical for trustworthiness quality records.

So we asked what's in a name? So I think I'm a good example for this. You know how many people have the same or similar names and names may change through marriage or different circumstances. And regardless of what change has happened to your name, your ORCID ID remains the same. So individuals and organizations can use alphabets, abbreviations or naming conventions as you can see, they're different because these are different languages. And these are different variations of a name. So people use different versions of their names during the career and an interesting example is this paper. This is a screenshot from an actual paper and the name Gagandeep Singh, there are two different people by the same name. But because of having ORCID IDs, it's possible to disambiguate which researcher is responsible for which paper. 

So ORCID also solves name variation, but the ID never changes. So there's a part of the ORCID ID or the ORCID record, sorry, that shows different you know, name variations. So this person can be Kareem Ben Romdan but then some articles would show them as KB Romdan or Kareem B Romdan, or, you know, different variations of the same person's name. But all of these would still be recorded under the ORCID ID. It is also easier to connect researchers, their affiliations and outputs throughout their career. And this is why it's so important for researchers to use identifiers for these affiliations and their outputs. So researchers can easily register for an ORCID ID. And so this would enable you to distinguish yourself, and also add your biography to your ORCID record. So, you know, even a brief bio can quickly distinguish you from other researchers who have the same name or the similar name. And I know, especially in Africa, my maiden name is Tembo. But there's so many Tembos. So this is, you know, you can see based on, you know, especially in Africa, I think that it's especially relevant for us.

So you start by signing in, you go to orcid.org/sign in and you set up to edit, use the little pencil icon to edit the biography section, then you go ahead and add your bio. And don't forget to save that.

So, also, you can't lose access to your records, because you can easily add an additional ORCID record. Some people use email addresses for their current work. But it's also important to add your personal email in the event that you lose access to one of those email addresses for whichever institution you're linked with.

So to never get locked out, it's a very easy process, you just sign in. And then you edit your email preferences, you add your permanent email. So in this box, you'd be able to type your permanent email and add another email field and click Add. And then a verification email would be sent to that address which would also allow you to set privacy.

So yeah, so you can be sure that only certain email addresses will have access to the ORCID record.

So the ORCID record, click that the ORCID record contains information about the researcher's research life. And I'm glad that Joe was able to send a screenshot of her ORCID profile. And this can contain affiliations, professional activities, funding information, research outputs, research resources, peer reviews, website URLs and other IDs. And you might remember that on Jo's ORCID record, her Scopus ID was there. But for this example, there's the researcher ID, profile system identifier, these are just examples. And you know, additional email addresses there.

Yeah, so this is basically what it would look like. And it's important to keep the magic of interconnected systems and interoperability. And researchers are always in the center. And this is a big aspect of what ORCID does.

 And so as you can see, publishers would be able to add research outputs and peer reviews, Discovery systems would be able to add other IDs, outputs, research activities, or even build a search and link wizard, which I'll talk about a bit more later. Funders can add funding entries and research institutions can add research activities and resources as well as other affiliations. So this shows all the different ways that systems can be connected.

ORCID member organization organizations add validated information. So basically when an ORCID member updates an ORCID record, the source of that update is captured in use. So for instance, if, so, yeah, so when this happens, they provide fast markers that can be used to help in decision making. So it shows where the information is coming from. So as you can see here, the source would be the ORCID integration at the University of Oxford because they're a member of ORCID. Also here, you can see Nature Publishing Group was the source of this entry in someone's ORCID record. So research organizations can add affiliations and publishers can add outputs and reviews. And also funders can add funding.

So as I mentioned earlier about the searching link wizard, researchers can use this service to claim their research outputs. And so what happens is that ORCID member organizations have built ORCID integrations that can help researchers to discover and connect their activities from within the ORCID records. So a list of Wizards is displayed upon login. So if you are inside your ORCID record,you'd be able to click add at this would show up search and  link here.

And at the moment, we have four DOI registration agencies that are using the search in link here, this data supporting this feature and those are arity CrossRef DataCite, in the Japan link center. And we're hoping for more, especially from Africa, moving forward. So in this area wizards is displayed upon login in the relevant section. So this particular section, sorry about that this particular section works. And yeah, so this, the relevant, the list of wizards would be displayed there. So at the moment, we have funding works, and hopefully in the future, we'll have peer reviews as well.

So when this happens, researchers will be prompted to grant access to the ORCID record and then take into the members website to select the works to be added. So this provides an extra layer of trust, because not anyone would be able to just add words to your ORCID record. So you'd have to grant them permission.

Yeah, so it displays the relevant organization as the source of the item. So in this case for my colleague, Estelle, it shows that choose the search and link wizard via arity. And that's how that works. And this is the pop up that will show.

Yeah, and if it shows all the information, then you'd be able to either authorize access or deny access, it's all up to you.

All also, authenticating would allow researchers to keep control of their data.

And so here, you have to create or connect your ORCID Id just to make sure that the correct ORCID ID is being connected to the information. So users need to sign in. And this guarantees that the correct ORCID ID is connected to the work.

It also shows who is asking so in this case, it will be the University of Milan.

And also which permissions are being given to the organization to whoever's requesting permission. And also, it's very important to note that permissions can be revoked at any time on the record setting. And this is in the control of the individual researcher.

So that's all about or good. And now I'd like to talk a bit about the global participation program, the GPP.

So the Global Participation Program is an initiative that was launched in response to the needs of the community, in partnership with our generous partners. 

And what happens is that we continue to see growing adoption around the world.

We have individual users, we have individual users in 250 countries around the world, which is every country on the planet apart from a few that are mentioned here.

Also, we have over 9 million yearly active researchers, and about 1339 organizational members, and over 5000 active integrated member systems. And this map here shows the member organizations in 57 countries. So the green, the green shaded areas represent the ORCID consortia and the blue shows ORCID members, but these are the gray areas, especially for Africa very concretely, because this shows that there are no institutional members and there are no consortium in these in these in the gray areas here.

So okay, its Global Participation Program is a two pronged approach to increase global participation, especially in the Global South. And so the first part of that is the membership equity program. And the second part being the global participation fund.

So a bit more about these two specific programs. So the first one is the membership equity program. And this is this program allows for countries to to create consortia but at discounted.

It fee so there's a discounted membership fee structure for consortium members if they're trying to create this. And if the members are coming from low income countries that would have a discount of 80%. While if they're coming from lower middle income countries, they would have a discount of 50%. So the membership equity program can only have countries coming members from countries who are either coming from low income countries or lower middle class.

Also, there's a lower threshold of three members for the initial year as opposed to five members, which is the normal of consortium consortium members.

And also this, this part of the GPP is fully funded by ORCID.

The second part of it is the global participation fund. And under this, there are two specific programs. So the first one is on community development and outreach, which is to find local partners to build these practices in the Global South. And all the other speakers on the call up under this under the community development and outreach. We also have technical integration grants. And these ones are meant to fund development of sis systems that are likely to drive participation in the Global South. We currently have only one, one grantee under the technical integration grants.

We're hoping for more. And I'll talk a bit more about this. So the GPF is made possible by the generosity of ORCIDs funding lenders, but the admin costs are funded by ORCID. So also, just to clarify that under the low income countries and the lower middle income countries, these classifications are under the at there as defined by the World Bank income classifications. And these are updated every year. So I could share a link to this year's classifications, I will share them in the chat afterwards. So the structure of the program supports a diversity of grantees to spread the risk and increase the chance of positive outcomes. So we do have two grant cycles per year. We're currently having the second cycle of the year. And we have about five grants per cycle. And the funding award for grants is between five and 20,000. US dollars. In terms of other grantee benefits, there is dedicated ORCID staff contact invitation to participate in the ORCID grantee forum and community invitations to grant community events, invitation to ORCID virtual and in person events as well as inclusion in ORCIDs ongoing communications program.

And then in terms of the focus and the goals of the fund, these need to align with the ORCID strategic objective to increase global participation. And I spoke a bit about the focus communities but it's only for countries that are sorry about that. It's only for organizations that are engaged in research and scholarship in low and lower middle income countries, particularly in the global south. So this is unfortunately not open to individuals only organizations.

And then in terms of the goals. This fund is meant to remedy ORCID participation gaps in the focus community areas by providing grants that would be able to develop ORCID communities of practice, to build understanding and use of ORCID in local context and also to create and enhance technical integrations that would support these communities.

So the third cycle is currently running. And there's a webinar tomorrow to talk about how to apply and any other details that you might need, in addition to what I have given, but also more details and registration are on this link. And this will be shared in the slides.

Yes, that's all from me. I will stop sharing my screen now. And I will wait for the other questions at the end. Thank you so much for this

Jo: Thank you so much Lombe, that was highly informative, and a lot of features that ORCID provides.

Penninah do you want to go next?

Penninah: Yes, Jo. I can.

Let me share my screen. 

Jo: The floor is yours

Penninah: Kindly confirm that you can see my screen. 

Jo: Yes. Yeah. 

Penninah: Thank you.

I was introduced by Ebuka. Thank you so much for that good bio. And I want to ask members within five to 10 minutes of our presentation about what Kenya is doing. The project is, as  

Tembo has explained we are one of the beneficiaries of this global participation fund open project. And that's what I want to share about.

So I'll just talk about the project background, the project activities and the lessons we have learned so far, and what we are and what we can share with others.

So about the project backgrounds, I can say that, please, I'm presenting on behalf of Kenya librarians and information services Consortium. I'm the treasurer in the governing board. And the first round of or the first cycle of the global participation fund, please was selected to receive that award from us or kid and our project title was actually empowering librarians is okay trainer of trainers. The duration of the project is actually one year; it's coming to an end in December. And the place is the implementing organization is your word from the template that they find it has to be implemented not by individuals but by organizations.

 So in Kenya it is curious which project is implemented that project what activities are we undertaking, or the project has been included? One was to train librarians to become Aki trainers or trainers that was done. happy to report that after the training, the librarians have formed a community of practice, where they share experiences and build on one another orcid adoption among their respective institutions. I'm happy to note the high number of the librarians from Kenya who have joined this webinar, and that I can say it is a statistic of this community of practice which was formed. So, we are able to share experiences. We are able to share opportunities through that CRP. We also developed training materials for what we are calling the do it yourself tutorial. And we are sharing these materials for future reference for self learning and facilitated training. So these materials, we are we we will not have that not of course not all member members have please participated. So we wanted from this project, we develop the tutorials and we share with the member institutions because there are over 140 members. So these materials are accessible to all members so they can train themselves. And they can also use them for training because we as we have indicated the librarians became trainers or trainers. After that we had trainee for directors of research from selected universities, and they were basically being trained on the best practices on ORCID adoption, which was shared something which came out is that among the universities, which participated, different universities that different levels in terms of Ocarina adoption, some and advanced even they are members of your organization members of Oxford, and they were really free. They shared with the new members about how to go about it. It was interesting that some directors of research did not have walkie they were resistant, that the expressions in terms of when one could get a CV, you see a kid was really good. Then demonstrations were done on how accounts can be updated. We noticed that some institutions insisted that you need to have an occupied account, so members would register for it and that is the stop. So the accounts are not updated. So we were able to demonstrate our accounts updates are done. So the reason why we're doing these directors of research was to provide support and provide advocacy to the librarians in their various institutions. So that we can ensure multiple stakeholder participation if you drive the agenda for ORCID adoption. Our last activity which we are yet to do, planned for November 2023, later this year, is to upgrade a number of institutional repositories to Dspace version seven, because that is the version which will allow us to integrate these institutional repositories with ORCID API. And this is one of the things you have heard Tembo talk about. How can you abstain from some of the activities going on? When Ebuka was reading my bio, he talked about having established institutional repositories in various institutions.

So I worked on that in those instant repositories, we can upgrade them to Dspace version seven. So now we are able to integrate them with the ORCID API. And that is we have planned that for later this next month.

So what are the expected outcomes of the project in Kenya, as I said, we are forming an awkward community of practice. And this commuter practice is going out to advocate for awkward adoption in Kenya, where the other one is organized occupy trainings in men in clinics, member institutions, this has happened and it continues to happen accurately, also started from our annual, our pre annual general meeting when we have so many members participating, and we are able to tell our members about ORCID, we another. Another outcome is the multi stakeholder approach where we want the librarians to work together with the directors of research to push the agenda of ORCID adoption, and then upgrading of institutional repositories to version seven. As I've explained, what are the lessons learned which are very interesting. One thing I've said is that we found that different institutions are at different levels, and we're happy about the way institutions were free to share with their others to build each other. We also realized that this was coming from the participants that there exists various personal personal identifiers online. So we're being asked what is so unique about ORCID interesting, whatever, to the Masucci when they add us, but one key thing which was coming out about okay is the how it is central, that when like, for instance, you register for Scopus ID, you don't need to create an account, provided you have an ORCID ID, you can you can use it and acquire the Scopus ID, same case to research ID you will you log in using the your ORCID ID so meaning the ORCID ID is very central that it can open doors for you in other identifiers, platforms that one was able to know. Then the formation of the ORCID, the community of practice, which was very, which was not there. But now after the formation we are seeing out there working the directors of research, really sharing a lot about what started in their various institutions, and how to keep the Occupy account up to date. Because like faculty researchers are very busy. We were very happy to note about the easier way of updating how you can update your account from Google Scholar, your walking account from Google Scholar by just downloading your big text, you have seen even tempo as soon as you search and the link there with that. So with that, it was very easy to learn how you can keep your ORCID ID account up to date, which was actually a challenge with most of the participants.

Interestingly in Kenya, it is a requirement that any postgraduate student has to have an ORCID ID as required by our national council of science and technology. Now, it was realized that out of these postgraduate students librarians do not play any role in terms of helping these students to acquire those ideas. And therefore we agreed that going forward, we are going to support our postgraduate students in terms of ORCID  registration. Something interesting was supporting our authors in identifying the articles using the ORCID family. Publishers are requiring that as you upload as you submit an article you provide an ORCID ID but some may not have or others they don't know where to put it. So we agreed that you're going to support them. We are also considering an ORCID Consortium for Kenya and I'm happy to learn about what Tembo shared then something else which was a take home message was the use of the QR codes as our ORCID. Us is that identification is awkward for researcher cards the way business people have business cards from the direction researchers forum we agreed they are going to have their researcher cards or their researcher cards will only contain the QR code. So when you are sharing their research, the researcher cards are somebody who just needs to scan that QR code and then be able to get what that person has done in various works, their affiliations and what Tembo has taken us through. So these are the lessons learned and I wish to stop there. Thank you so much for listening to me

Jo: Thank you very much. That was very insightful as well. And next up is Owen

Cecile: 

Hello.

Owen: 

Hello.

Jo: Do you want to go next? Oh, yes. Our sincere fine. Okay.

Cecile: Thank you. Let me share my screen. Please

Can you see it?

Jo: It's loading but yes, we'll be able to see you in a few seconds.

Cecile: Can you see my screen please? \

Jo: Not yet. But it's loading. Not yet. Okay. Is it?\

Cecile:  Is it now? 

No, not yet.

Jo: Yes. Now we can see your screen.

Cecile: Okay, is it okay now?

Jo:  Yes.  

Cecile: Okay, thank you

Okay, thank you very much for giving us this opportunity to share our work. I want to start by thanking first ORCID, which gave us this opportunity by giving us a grant. Forgive my mistakes. I'm doing my best to speak English please.

Our projects were for creating and implementing and I will see a consortium in Cote d'Ivoire. Yeah.

Before Can I have a nurse? The next Yeah. 

Yeah, okay. My presentation will be based on some key points, what was the situation of scholarly communication access in Cote d'Ivoire, and open science activities because we score yet is included in our activities for open science and occupied achievement. Oh, it was done and outlooks Thank you.

You can invoke the scholarly communication accessor was very difficult. It has always been difficult in Cote d'Ivoire. And towards the political crisis, we lost a lot of collections. And in 2012, the government was fully engaged in implementing the education reform, it was a bachelor master PhD. And it was very important to give visibility and accessibility to collections for communication force, scholarly communication.

And before, during, and after his political presence and beyond the COVID 19 pandemic, knowledge sharing was, and is still a key challenge to support training and research activities in Cote d'Ivoire. So one project was very important and crucial for us. It was the president of the Digital Library for higher education and scientific research. In Cote d'Ivoire created in 2016 16. It was a national repository, why it is a national repository to contribute to ancestor bar access to scholarly communication. The Digital Library facilitated understanding of open science with some key initiative projects and activities. I'm going to show you some of them.

The first one was the Digital Library, as I said before, as a collaborative tool for your and it's one

As an opportunity for the consortium for education consequent to two allies networking, and strengthening and development skills, you can see the authorities, the ministry, at this time lighting the library and you can see the community of librarians in the picture.

One of the key activities we developed to raise awareness and sensitize people is the open access week in Cote d'Ivoire. It started in 2018. And it aims to develop partnership collaboration, and also to networking and capacity building, you can see some pictures of some activity activities. You can see the authority given the digitalized Thesis and Dissertation to our director general, or UCI Director General EBCI is the university coordinating the Digital Library as a national repository in Cote d'Ivoire.

And you can see the word vis activities to give visibility, traceability and visit and accessibility to scholarly publishing, we started working on a project of a persistent identifier by a identity federation project. This identity federation project was very important for us to develop access with end users, a common practice communities of practice, also in such as researchers, librarians, and so on, and you can see that so at Visa Pro, yet, we were able to make networking with and develop partnerships, we've worked land and we've taken others in Cote d'Ivoire, such as an oven in Cote d'Ivoire, and universities and so on. So, we also have an institutional policy for open science signed into tight inaccurate 2022 And we are working now to develop a national policy for open science. And you can see that we organized also a National Symposium on open science called all this and decision makers and so on, we need now to go

by sensitizing researchers also the growth of ORCID GPF is always welcome, why we need to have persistent identifiers to promote and enhance the visibility and accessibility of researchers, data analysts researchers results, it was very crucial for us in Cote d'Ivoire and for listeners community is acid acid persistent identifier is assigned to each researchers, which facilitate is

 access to publication and research data improves the discoverability of scientific content, particularly African, African and I can add Francophone because we are not so visible like other English countries.

For UVCI the project ORCID aims to contribute to face the challenge of visibility, accessibility, traceability and research assessment. The Aussie consortium aims to establish a community of practice at the national level, to share knowledge to help to accelerate the integration of Aussie into organizers, organizations, channel systems.

And you can see how it was done for us first 

And then was to have some to make sensitization and to share information in our institution, and in the consortium, to share also and sensitize the librarians and the directors of education librarians, on the interests of this project we are starting. So we organize a lot of meetings, we organize work, online meetings, webinars, to sensitize first, the consortium members, every library consortia, some members, and also the staff, with the researchers in our institution. So, in the first workshop, the workshop was to form the theme of a project and also to share, to form them,to give them a chance to develop their skills.

And so after this, we were able to, by sharing information with, with team members to adapt our first work to our second workshop, which was a training for trainers, we train 40 people, researchers, directors, or libraries, and ELLs, and also these decision makers. And for us, when we understood that it was very important and ORCID skills in Cote d'Ivoire, we will do our training based on four modules. The first one was to explain what is persistent identifier or seed issues and antivirus policy and strategies. The second module was based on our consortium, how we can define it, objective and mission. And the third one was the practical exercise to create and enrich and for creating an illusion, the FFS with publication and research references. Why? Because we discovered that researchers have all of them, the majority of them have an ORCID account, but they didn't use it. They didn't use it, to give themselves visibility. And with the Module Four was to plan how we can create a way they can create Consortium for national consortium and how we can have our roadmap. So we will work in this workshop for three days, we work on four working groups: awareness and advocacy, strategic policies, capacity building, organization and funding and a roadmap for creating and implementing the Aussie national consortium in Cote d'Ivoire. You can see some of the participants in this picture. Iran, the Director General of the university, the Virtual University in Cote d'Ivoire, who is coordinating all the open science activities and also with live cells and workmen and also the ORCID project.

So, I was challenged by an outlook that the Library Consortium should be engaged in projects of persistent identifiers of for visibility of researchers and data set for attribution of DOI to enhance the repositories use accessibility and visibility and research institution. We will link this in all our global activities for open science and the next project we will be implementing is DOI. Yes.

The second point is creating and implementing an ORCID consortium is a great platform for Library Consortium members to strengthen librarian skills first, and enhance collaboration with research communities. Sometimes there is a gap between librarians and researchers who have If this project were the first activities we achieve with we saw that researchers as able to see one of the importance of librarians in their institution. We also, were also able to advocate for open access and open science policies to strengthen also research assessment capacities in academic and research administration, it is it is easy when all our researchers will have an acid and you account and using this ORCID account to make the outputs visible and to make the activities also very visible online. The outlook: the first outlook for us is to continue our sensitization and advocacy activities from September to December, we are continuing advocacy. Yeah, now the train with trainers we have in each institution is also making sensitization and advocacy. Second one is the launch of the April core training. It will be we were planning it in October, but what our Open Access week will be in November and we will learn to report running what will be the what this mean, the core training is for each institution we will organize it running on our seat like in the same way we organize Fortran as of tonight, but it will be a bridge online and physically and refer to what referred action will be too large of a consortium in ORCID in 2024.

After this, you can see that the project will be implemented as a continuity for 2024. And for us, we have a great opportunity also to continue to employ two visits per year toward one of the prayers for open science, open science, which will start in November, also October and November for open science based on renewable energies and climate change. And our institution agree to give the first support by sharing its infrastructure support, tools support to form a membership fees, payment in order to push it to the other institution to engage themselves who have to make our consortium ORCID consortium in Cote d'Ivoire very dynamic, and we hope that everything is going well for us. And we are continuing our advocacy. Yeah, thank you very much. That is all for positive achievement on ORCID project with the grant we got from the GPF fund. Okay, thank you very much. 

Jo: Merci beaucoup. Thank you so much for sharing all these insights from Cote d’ivoire. And now we have Owen Iyoha to share from Eko Konnect how your activities are going in Nigeria, or the implementation of the ORCID grant. Welcome.

Owen: Can you confirm that you can see my screen?

Jo:  Looks good.

Owen: Okay. All right. 

So, I'd like to thank Jo and the team for basically putting this webinar together and all the work we're doing with these series of webinars that are very enlightening to see what goes on different aspects of utilization of infrastructure to promote Scholarly Communications. And of course, I'd like to thank ORCID as well. Eko Connect is an NREN in Nigeria. And we're also one of the beneficiaries of the global participation fund from ORCID.

Now, I work for Eko connect. And unlike the two previous speakers, I'm not really an academic, and more of a service provider for NREN national research and education networks. So the remnant of enrollment is to be able to provide infrastructure that facilitates and promotes better research and education practice. And in recent years, there's been a drive for the promotion of open science and open access, and to increase the visibility of scholarly and research outputs in Africa, because there's a perception that research outputs and scholarly outputs from the continent are very low. But a lot of that is down to the fact that there is a lot of research that is being done and being produced. But they're not visible in the global ecosystem because of

low adoption of the various infrastructure, and technologies like persistent identifiers that bring that visibility to the global community.

And of course, even from an individual basis for researchers themselves to be visible as well, they need to also adopt these identifiers. And ORCID is one of the key persistent identifiers that not only promotes the divisibility of researchers, as Lombe said in her presentation at the beginning, it also caters for disambiguation. So researchers, you know who the research actually is. And if researchers have mobility that they're moving from one institution or organization to another, the ORCID record and their words will follow them wherever they are. So it's very key, that for researchers, they actually have an ORCID ID. And of course, from the presentation we've already heard, there are tight integrations between our kids, the infrastructure with other infrastructure and persistent identifiers. So the more that we adopt ORCID, the more visibility for institutions for researchers for works in the global research and education space.

So, as I said, Eko connect is an NREN provider, typically NRENs deals with matters of connectivity on campus networks. But beyond that, Eko connect tries to focus on providing what we call above the network services. So obviously, beyond the core networking, infrastructure and bandwidth, we try to look at providing services that bring more value in terms of ability to collaborate and improve education practice. So we’re the national operator for edu room, edu room ensures Wi Fi roaming allows, you know, researcher and student mobility. And we’re the operators of what we call the Nigerian identity federation, or edu id.ng. Cecile sort of alluded to federated identity in her presentation, and federated identity or academic identity is known generically as edu ID. So this is an infrastructure and an identity that actually allows students to be able students and researchers and people in the academic community to be able to access platforms and services from service providers in a trusted and secure, secure manner. And that infrastructure can also envelope identifiers and metadata like ORCIDs as well. So when we're promoting the uptake of edu ID, we can also in tandem promote the adoption of the ORCIDs. So that's very important to us in Eko connect.

I also act as the co-chair of one of the working groups in Lipsense. Think you've heard Lipsense a number of times in the earlier presentations. So Lipsense is kind of a community of practitioners who are librarians and researchers, and NREN service providers like myself, we come together in this forum to see how we can collaborate and ensure that as NRENS, we can deliver the necessary infrastructure that researchers and librarians require to build or improve their own research and education practice.

In Nigeria, we kind of have a community governed Open Science Cloud that we support.

And in this cloud, we have some platforms and infrastructure that can be used as repositories, shared repository services, hosting services for repositories, edu room and academic identity infrastructure that higher education institutions in Nigeria can actually adopt as part of their infrastructure and practice. And, of course, we've become a paid infrastructure provider for Nigeria. And in fact, from the first of November, Eko connect will officially be the lead organization for the data sites DOI consortium in Nigeria. So we're very excited about that.

Right, as I said, we Eko connect we are beneficiary of the arcade and global participation Fund, and the goals. The general goals of ORCID adoption in Nigeria, which are in line with what we've told our kid we, we have as our goals is to really, you know, increase the adoption of our kid in, in our higher education institutions in Nigeria, the Nigeria has nearly 200 universities, and over 150 polytechnics. So there is a huge number of higher education institutions, and many other research institutions in the country. However, the adoption of ORCIDs has been very low, considering the size of the country. So we see this as a huge opportunity for the country. So the challenges of actually getting advocacy working in campuses and promoting ORCID adoption is very challenging. But we're actually being used to utilizing the fund, we've got to actually get to the campuses to try to develop these open science communities, and thereby increase ORCID adoption. 

So the goals have really been very similar to the ones that pin combiner and seal have talked about shrinking key personnel between universities who can act as train the trainer in terms of how they can acquire and utilize arcades, among other among other pets, and also to talk to governments and the main Education Fund in Nigeria, which is called Set fund. They're the kind of funding agency for higher education in Nigeria. And it's also to kind of have meetings that educate the government. Some of the bodies like then you see, which is the umbrella body for universities, and there are other umbrella bodies for polytechnics and colleges of education. So we want to try to educate these organizations about the importance and utilization of peds and ORCIDs and how that should actually be embedded in national policy for the promotion of open science and open access. Now, unlike some of the presentations I've heard, like in Kenya, that does seem to be a national policy for the implementation of arcades and maybe some other paints and open science policies. In Nigeria, we do not currently have any national overacting open science policy to do this.

So what we've been doing is really trying to advocate for open science and open access at different levels within the cater of the research and education community to try to promote pet adoption in general market adoption, in particular, as part of promoting open access and open science practice.

So one of the ultimate goals as well, is to actually have an instruction. So that will actually help us to promote our communities as well.

So some of our expected results of the firm is to have institutional support for all kids in at least six Universities.

Jo: I think you accidentally muted. We can't hear you.

Owen: Hello, can you hear me now?

Okay, my apologies when the right so some of our expected outcomes is to have institutional support for our kids in at least six universities. By the end of Q1 Next year, I think we will definitely over achieve that target.

And at the same time, as well, we're targeting the end of quarter one of 2024 establishing an awkward consortium comprising the front national funding agency for higher education that will fund ourselves as Eko konnect with other institutions by the end of quarter one of 2024.

And not so sure if we're going to meet that deadline at the moment. But that's the intended output. And the other thing is we want to align ORCID this complaint complementarity between ORCID and educate the adoption in the research and education community. As I said earlier, that UI thing is very important for accessing a plethora of services. But that infrastructure has the ability to envelope other paints such as arcades within that infrastructure as well. So we're having a kind of multi pronged approach to the adoption of arcades, whereby we're asking institutions that if you're adopting at UID infrastructure, then you may as well in by poking into that as well, because at UAB can actually house and get it.

And then basically try to make peds or persistent identifiers, key open science infrastructure beyond the grant period as dictated by ORCID. So these are kind of our expenses, our outputs.

Our activities, I'm going to sort of talk through some of the activities.

Our project schedule for the year was kind of behind schedule. This is primarily because earlier in the year, Nigeria had elections. And during the elections, all higher education institutions were asked to sit close down. So all universities and polytechnics and research institutes were closed for about four, four or five weeks from February to March. And so that has actually impacted on the academic calendars of those institutions. And then for us to also be able to schedule activities as well, was also affected. So we're kind of two months behind our extended schedules, which is why while the project found itself is scheduled to end, by December of this year, we're seeing our activity still spilling over into February March in order to catch up.

Anyway, we have started to engage in some of our key activities in the second quarter towards the end of the second quarter of the year.

And

We had a pin workshop with 

AULNU is actually the Library Consortium for Nigeria University librarians. So all new stands for Association of University Librarians of Nigerian universities. And in that workshop, we actually spoke to the librarians. These are the head Librarians of all the universities, we met them in Abuja, and had a workshop talking about puppets more from an overview of strategic perspective. And we actually got to learn that many of our librarians, their knowledge of peds, and arcades is relatively low.

And so there was an agreement that we will hold another workshop with all the librarians in November, to do a very hands-on kind of ORCID clinic.

To actually get these librarians kind of familiar with arcades, they tended to think he was something very difficult to acquire many of them, they didn't understand that actually, registering for an occupied ID is a fairly relatively simple process. But what we wanted to make sure we could do is get the librarians themselves confidence about how they can acquire these occupy bees by putting all their various career and academic information into their arcade record. So that they could also in turn, actually advocate for, for them, librarians and researchers in their institutions to do likewise. So I would look at that May May meeting as a sensitization workshop. And then we're actually subsequently having another workshop in November. We've already had Librarians of Nigerian universities.

A few, just about less than a month ago, we actually had a meeting as well with the Association of vice chancellors of Nigerian universities. So we were able to get about 25 Vice Chancellors to attend this meeting. And we tried to explain to the Vice Chancellor the business case for the promotion of open science, open access, and paid adoption. And what we, what we were able to explain to the Vice Chancellors was that open science practice, even though it is open, open, sometimes it first free, but open science practice does come at some price, and that Vice Chancellors need to be able to have budgets put aside for the promotion of open science and open access adoption. In the universities. It was a very engaging discussion. And out of this meeting, we actually have an indication where these 25 vice chancellors have agreed that they would sort of come together as kind of early adopters, so to speak of the recommendations to pay for the adoption and open science practice. And we have a communique and an agreement where these 25 institutions have in principle agreed that they will look for budgets to promote the adoption of peds, encourage the adoption of ORCIDs in their institutions, and also become members of any necessary consult here that are required to promote the adoption of open science. So in principle, these institutions from these 25 universities are agreeing to commit to doI consortium, ORCID consortium and something referred to as s plan consortium, all in the goal of promoting open science and open access. So these were the outcomes. This was coming. We have a communique that was put out to this effect and an expression of agreements.

An expression of interest agreements was signed by all of these Vice Chancellors to that effect. So we're hoping in this last quarter

I want to follow up with that we've got a kind of little roadmap, a six month roadmap of what we want these Vice Chancellors to do, between now and the end of March, to fulfill this. So we're quite excited about that.

In September as well, there was a Lipsense Open Science Symposium in Abuja, Nigeria. As I said earlier on part of the Lipsense impacts. Everybody here really is actually part of Lipsense, if you even read even if you realize it or not, so there was a two day symposium. And there were a few sessions that talked about PIDs including DOIs X and ORCID.

Now this month, in fact, next week, we are in Benin, University of Benin, going to be running an ORCID workshop for postdocs, postgraduates, doctorates, libraries and some other key academic persons. I'm not quite sure of the exact numbers at the moment. But we're looking at about 60 participants being involved in that workshop next week, and the following week running a similar workshop in another university in the southern parts of Nigeria.

And we're trying to plan a date to run a PID workshop for our funding agency and other government regulatory organizations. We're just trying to get the date fixed for November. I think by next week, we'll know the exact dates. And of course, another key activity we're looking at is our users conference, Eko Connect has a user's conference every year in the third week, usually the third week of January. For the last few years, these meetings have been virtual because of COVID. But the next users conference is going to be our first physical conference 

since COVID. And part of that conference, apart from having an out of pocket session in the conference, we want to run what we're calling an awkward clinic throughout the conference where people can just come to a desk and inquire about ORCID and how to actually get one. And there'll be somebody there, who will just take anyone who's interested through the process of acquiring an ORCID ID.

So this is just a map of Nigeria, Just to give you a kind of indication of what we were doing. So like I said, we're having the arcade arcade workshops, starting this month in two universities, University of Benin, and the Federal University of Technology Owerri, and these are in the southern parts of the country.

Normally, in order to be able to get to the northern part of the country, it's a flight of about 90 minutes. So that shows you how big and vast the country is. But between November and December, we're hoping to be able to run our other arcade workshops in some of these designated universities before the holiday season begins in December.

So the lessons learned so far, well, we're still we're still learning as we kind of go along. But what we are realizing, at least from a Nigerian perspective, is that we need to structure our dissemination in a hierarchical manner. Because we found that even when we engage directly with librarians, about the adoption of ORCIDs, they might be enthusiastic about it. But they always seem to refer to the fact that in order to have wider adoption, and quality implementation, we need to get the buy-in of management of vice chancellors. So we always heard that needs to happen. So we've actually looked okay, apart from actually meeting the practitioners themselves, the librarians, the researchers, the lecture is that we need to actually do advocacy.

An education of management so that they understand the importance and the business of ORCID and how it can enhance the institution's reputation and visibility and opportunities, you know. So like I said, when we had the engagement with the vice chancellors, we came at that slant and they would take it was very enlightening for, for them that they could see that oh, in terms of getting visibility for their institutions, the ability to adopt and utilize these persistent identifiers, have the researchers and academics that use ORCID IDs is actually improves the visibility, potential opportunity that these vice chancellors are seeking. So we've learned that we need to really hit the vice chancellors and the policy makers at the government level, to have the impacts that we're, we're kind of looking for. So we're kind of seeing that hierarchy as Vice Chancellors than the librarians, early career researchers, academic staff and students. So we see that hierarchy of the higher up that hierarchy we can get to the greater the impacts.

We've also learned that at least for Nigerian librarians, many of them are still, you know, how do I say this without sounding too, you know, savvy, not offensive, or many of our librarians in Nigeria, still kind of doing outdated library practice. And they've not fully realized that with digital transformation, the roles of librarians have changed to become custodians of information on custodians of the institution's assets. And if they start to understand how the rules have evolved, then they will have a greater appreciation for the need to use ORCID IDs among their staff, and among the, the, the community in the universities.

And again, better articulation of fair compliance. And the benefit of our kid for career researchers is something we realize is a lesson we need to do an advocacy we need to put across to many of researchers, particularly now our career Early career researchers who are becoming post doctorates post graduates who need to understand that to engage in the global research and education ecosystem and open science, they should be adopting these ORCID IDs and ensuring that the infrastructure they utilize is using appropriate paid infrastructure. And then one key lesson we've also learned is that it would appear that physical training workshops still seem to be more effective than online workshops, that Eko konnect, obviously, with the ability to use platforms like zoom, it's a very powerful tool because of the reach we can get. But we're still finding that when we do physical workshops, the engagement seems to be a whole lot more and a whole lot more impactful than online. So that's been an interesting lesson that we've, we've learned and we're still learning as we come into the final phases of the project, fun for okay, but obviously, we want to continue to promote arcade and peds in general, beyond the lifetime of the projects. So I think that's really just a brief from the Nigerian perspective. Thank you.

Jo: Thank you very much Owen, that's fantastic and very informative. Also, a lot of information is shared by all of you.

I would like to take the opportunity now that we're all still in the room together.

To ask if there's questions that you might have, feel free to unmute. Just ask along, or any of us here. And we did have some conversation in the chat because some of us are already convinced that ORCID is a great feature and service to utilize for the reasons mentioned to make information sharing about the scholarly achievements seamless between the various stakeholders like

So longer explained in great detail to us.

And now, for those who are sitting on positions like librarians and research managers, how can we ensure that there is capacity financially and timewise to share that information with with other users who are well, the target audience actually use ORCID and to implement it, or to implement it institutionally, there's also what we all of us work for work towards have an institutional subscription with zakat. There's some financials involved in that. So that's another.

Yeah, opportunity to for and one art challenge, actually, for some institutions by the consortium approach the retargeting through this program, is meant to and again was pointed out by longer, it's meant to reduce the cost and providing the service for institutions to to make use of that for individuals, just to make that clear for individual researchers and scholars that produce scholarly content. ORCIDs is a free service. And, it has a lot of benefits. That, that, yeah, that can

kind of cross various other scholarly services that are also useful for the purpose of research dissemination, and discoverability of in particular, African research.

As we will learn more often, I have already heard often in this webinar series, so I'm okay. But to answer that question, or the question was answered in the chat, you also find links to the game to the global participation program by ORCID and the fund and application side. So if you are working in an institution, reach out to your colleagues and the people in charge to apply for that fund, like we did at the time for the grant cycle. And Lombe, please do you want to add anything?

Lombe: Um, well, nothing really, I think I think it covered it really well. And also, in case people have any more questions on how exactly to apply. There's a webinar tomorrow, and Jo shared one of the links, so yeah, I don't have anything else to add. Thank you. 

Jo: Thank you. And for Owen, Cecile and Peninnah.

What would you see we've heard from each of you refer to friends, particularly challenges, but also suggestions and advice on how to go about there's various aspects to consider and people in positions to consider when it comes to incentivizing the adoption of ORCID to the individual researchers.

And also to, to engage discussions at an institutional level.

If you're, if you summarize them from your presentation of your view, we'll have to point out one

one strategy and one approach that worked really well so far, in one particular use case that comes to mind. Um, could you share that again with us? Just some, some traction?

Owen: Well, I don't know if it's a use case, per per se. But in many Nigerian universities, and I've seen many, but I know they're sort of Nigerians of the audience. So they may have comments, but in a lot of universities, for researchers, in terms of their careers, it is publish or perish, kind of mantra, that in order for them to gain promotion, and advance their careers, they need to ensure that they are publishing papers in high impact journals, you know, platforms.

And that basically, is part of the criteria on which they are assessed for promotions. And they're really been left totally to their own devices to be able to do that. So they get very little institutional support to do that. They are expected to be able to find a way of doing that. And

in the engagements we're having now with management's and vice chancellors were trying to the track, they're actually now starting to appreciate that that mantra needs to change and that they need to be a whole lot more supportive of the, of the, of the researchers and librarians and that they should actually be helping financially or in an encouraging them so that their own objectives have higher visibility of their scholarly outputs and research outputs, and the institution is rises. So it was quite strange that many people didn't fully understand that. But the message is now starting to get across that this needs to be the way to go forward, more embracing of open access and open standards. 

Jo: Yeah, I think that's an important point you're raising, because the misconception about the importance of the journal impact factor is cross cutting around the world, unfortunately, and very persistent. And it's up not as an identifier, but as a measure for quality or reach. And it's actually not true. So I think we also have to show that Mark Ailing is also from the lens, we have a session with them in early December. So to provide proof of that, you can actually get the Reach for the visibility of the research outputs through open science, scholarly infrastructure, and through tools and services that make use of persistent identifiers like ORCID like your eyes like and roar, also research organization registry, which we'll come to hear about from Peninnah. What would you like to add to this? And what's the experience from Kenya?

Peninnah: The experience from Kenya and what has come out from the discussions, we have had one strategy, which is mainly used his water participants who attacked me as carrot and stick strategy, whereby on one hand that the researchers are being shown the importance of use of PIDs, so that they can enhance their own visibility and discoverability. But on the other hand, they are bringing in the issue of a stick that for promotion, for any support to be for you to find research or to get our support from the university, they need to have these P IDs. So it comes like it on one side they are being pushed, but on the other side, they are being shown the benefits of adoption of our kid. So that is what is working in Kenya, which was shared by various institutions that they have adopted. 

Jo; Yeah, thank you. And I also think adoption of individuals is relatively high compared to other countries because it's been a top down incentive at  institutional level. Thank you so much, and Cecile.

Thank you very much.

Cecile: For us in Cote d'Ivoire, we launched our roadmap. And we are working now to expand the ORCID use in each of the public universities. And we think that challenge for us is how we can achieve the engagement of each decision maker. And I think that with the training of trainers we made in July we have focal points, and we need to go through to work with this focal point during our court training in order to continue advocacy like I said, advocacy is very important for us. I won when we met some researchers and we showed them individually the interest to know how to use ORCID, majority of them have an ORCID and sometimes they think that they don't need this workshop and when we continue explaining our oak you can change the visibility and enhance the credibility of a research. They are able now to understand and go through the ORCID account to add the publication and feel the other part of the ORCID account. We think that we need to go ahead. We need to go ahead and librarians need to be more engaged. It is the first for me, it will work for librarians.

Researchers also can be engaged if they want to try in the office, because during our trainers workshop, we give them the opportunity to go to train with their communities. And now we've got, we will see, we will be able to see the results of this individual training and community training, we think that it is very important for us to continue with this project. And in 2024, we will be implementing our consortium really.