Speakers

Caroline Ncube is a professor in the Department of Commercial Law at UCT. She holds the National Research Foundation/Department of Science & Technology (NRF/DST) Research Chair in Intellectual Property, Innovation and Development under the auspices of the South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI).

She holds a PhD from the University of Cape Town, an LLM from the University of Cambridge and an LLB degree from the University of Zimbabwe. She is a Fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Society and a Shell Centenary Fund Scholar. She participates in several international research networks, including the Open African Innovation Research network (Open AIR) partnership.

Daniel holds a PhD in Environmental Studies – Human Ecology and Master of Public Health together with Bachelors in Information Management. He has been involved extensively on ESIA/EA of Development projects and building capacity in the field of environment and health. He is the recipient of several awards and one notable one is the 2016 Climate Information Prize (Wazo Prize) by UKAid and Cardno. He is also a fellow at InterAcademy Partnership (IAP) Africa Science Policy Fellowship (Science Advice for Policy) at the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) at Pretoria. The fellowship focused on mapping SDG 6 and its intersection with other SDGs and looking at the stakeholder landscape as well. His interest as well, is in climate change, food security, consumer health and safety of food entering consumer markets, occupational health and safety, and country localization of the 17 SDG goals in Vision 2030 for achievement of targets.  A more recent interest involved activities of Africa Open Science platform; a very important component in liking our local universities in developing countries to open source resources. Data science is also an area of interest that he would like to nurture to be able to visualize the data obtained in research using available tools.

Helena Asamoah-Hassan is the Executive Director of the African Library and Information Associations and Institutions (AfLIA) with a PhD in African Art and Culture. She is currently the Chairperson of the Ghana Library Authority Board. A position she has held from 2018. Previously she was the University Librarian of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana. She has been a librarian for 42 years and was the President of the Ghana Library Association from 2003 to 2006.  She served as a member of the IFLA Governing Board from 2007 to 2011, been a member of the EIFL Advisory Board from 2007 to 2011, the Chairperson of the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Ghana from 2004 to 2014, the Ghana Country Coordinator for INASP and EIFL from 2004 to 2014, and Emerald Publishers 1st Africa Regional Advisor from 2011 to 2013. Additionally, she has been the Chairperson of UNESCO’s International Advisory Committee on the Memory of the World Programme from 2013 to 2015. Awards include the 2012 BioMed Central Open Access Advocate of the Year and the 2012 IFLA Medal awardee. As a scholar, she has 25 publications,78 conference papers and 20 major reports.

Jaya Raju is Professor and Head of the Department of Knowledge and Information Stewardship (Humanities Faculty) at the University of Cape Town. She has a PhD in Information Studies.  Jaya Raju has served on the Editorial Advisory Board of the South African Journal of Libraries and Information Science and as its Editor-in-Chief from 2013 to 2018. She also serves on the Editorial Advisory Boards of the Southern African Journal of Communication & Information Science; African Journal of Libraries, Archives and Information Science; International Journal of Information, Diversity & Inclusion; Libri: The International Journal of Libraries and Information Studies, and, De Gruyter’s Open Information Science.  She is co-editor of the ALISE Book Series on LIS education and research. She has published in peer-reviewed national and international journals and presented papers at local, national and international conferences. She is currently Co-Chair of IFLA’s Building Strong LIS Education (BSLISE), an active global network of LIS educators and researchers. In 2018, Jaya Raju became Subject Chair for Library and Information Science on the Scopus Content Selection & Advisory Board – an international group of scientists and researchers, representing major scientific disciplines, tasked with evaluating journals applying for inclusion on the Scopus indexing list.

Jayshree is an experienced professional with extensive experience of academic libraries in the UK, the South Pacific and Australia. Her current role is Research Services Coordinator at Charles Darwin University, and she is Chair of the Research support Community Day, an annual PD event for research librarians in Australia which she initiated.

She is actively  involved with ALIA (Australian Library and Information Association) and IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions). Jayshree was the ALIA NT Manager for a number of years and convenes the annual ALIA Top End Recognition Award.  She is also the Co-Convenor of the IFLA RSCAO (Regional Standing for Asia and Oceania) and the Information Coordinator for the Academic and Research Libraries Section of IFLA. Her special interests include open access, social media for research and research impact.

Jill Claassen has worked at University of Cape Town (UCT) Libraries as the section manager of scholarly communication and research since November 2014. One of sections she oversees is scholarly communication and publishing, which is responsible for implementing UCT’s Open Access Policy by making UCT’s scholarship discoverable through the institutional repository, OpenUCT, which already has over 25, 000 scholarly works openly available. This section also has an open access publishing service, which includes publishing open journals and open monographs and textbooks. The philosophy of this publishing service is to share African scholarship, by making it accessible to everyone on the continent and the world, thus ensuring that Africa’s scholarly output is visible and contributes to the global knowledge economy. Currently there are five emerging journals, ten monographs and two textbooks on the publishing platforms.

With a background in Evolution and Developmental Biology, Dr. Johanna Havemann is a trainer and consultant in [Open] Science Communication and [digital] Science Project Management. Her work experience covers NGOs, a science startup and international institutions including the UN Environment Programme. With a focus on digital tools for science and her label Access 2 Perspectives, she aims at strengthening global science communication in general – and with a regional focus on Africa – through Open Science.

Joshua Neds-Fox is the Coordinator for Digital Publishing at the Wayne State University Libraries in Detroit, Michigan, USA, where he oversees library publishing, digital collections, and the institutional repository. He is a former Board Member of the Library Publishing Coalition, co-editor of that organization's Ethical Framework for Library Publishing, and a member of the Library Publishing Workflows grant team, documenting library publishing processes from a range of perspectives

Lena Nyahodza, a Scholarly Communication Librarian at the University of Cape Town (UCT) Libraries, is an open access enthusiast who advocates for open sharing of scholarship. Lena is also a PhD candidate who perceives open scholarship as a democratic agent that supports social justice. She actively participates in the openness movement through interacting with content creators, training on the need for individual authors to retain copyright and use open licenses to end knowledge commodification. As a Scholarly Communication Librarian, some of her responsibilities include supporting and managing UCT Libraries’ open access platforms that are hosted on open source software such as Open Journal Systems (newly published open research), Open Monograph Press (open textbooks & monographs) and DSpace (open research & open educational resources) that are intended to support equal access to knowledge for all. Her advocacy work includes orienting the university community on how to participate in green, gold and diamond open access. Lena has been a member of the International Open Access Week Advisory Committee since 2018.

Dr Neil Jacobs is interim programme manager for cOAlition S, the international alliance of research funders seeking a quick and cost-effective transition to open access.  He is also head of open science and research lifecycle at Jisc, the digital agency for UK education and research.  He leads Jisc’s strategy to support research, covering open science, research analytics and research infrastructure.  He has previously led national and international programmes and services supporting open science and, in 2017 as head of open science in the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, he promoted UK policy positions supporting open research to strengthen the reputation of UK research.

Roxanne Missingham is University Librarian at Australian National University. She actively works collaboratively with academics to open up access to knowledge through open access publishing, digital scholarship projects and the transformation of collections. She draws together interests in copyright, digital transformation and librarianship to seek new opportunities to develop scholarly communication.  She is a past President of the Australian Library and Information Association and has been actively involved in the Council of Australian University Librarians.

Dr. Solomon Mekonnen is an Academic Staff in the Library with the rank of Assistant Professor and Open Access Coordinator at the Addis Ababa University (AAU). Apart from his role at AAU, Solomon coordinates nationally Open Access Programme of an international network called Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL) representing Consortium of Ethiopian Academic and Research Libraries. He is also a local organizer in Ethiopia for an international network called Open Knowledge Foundation. As part of his role as local organizer, he coordinates the Open Knowledge community in Ethiopia focusing on open data and open science. Solomon has participated in many projects related to open data and open access at the national and institutional level including a project on opening and visualizing Ethiopian election 2015 data, Ethiopian Journals Online, National Digital Repository and national open access policy. He also organized and run various workshops and trainings on open access and open data.  Solomon completed his PhD in Information system from the University of South Africa.

Tom Olyhoek has been living and working in Africa during many years. After obtaining his PhD in molecular microbiology from Amsterdam University (1982) he has been at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin for 7 years. He has spent seven years in Kenya and Algeria doing research on malaria, sleeping sickness and meningococcal epidemics. Since 2012 he is advocating open access and open science as Open Access working group coordinator for Open Knowledge International. Shortly afterwards he became a member of the (DOAJ(Directory of Open Access Journals)advisory board and since2014 he is Editor in Chief at the DOAJ. From January 2018 his main task has become managing of the global DOAJ ambassador programme and global outreach activities including connecting to other open communities like the Creative Commons Global Network and OCSD Net.From2019-2021the programme has a special focus on Africa. He is also a member of Force11 where he teaches at the Force11 Summer School on the topic of how to evaluate scientific quality for journals, articles and individual scholars. His current research interests are, copyright and licensing in open access publishing, development of new ways to assess the quality of scholars and scholarly works and coordinating research in the area of soil microbiology in relation to soil health and human health (microbiome research).