The importance of a common data sharing survey for advancing open science in Africa

Cognizant to the fact that to build capacity within research systems in sub-Saharan Africa, a better understanding of current data sharing practices amongst African researchers is needed, the International Development Research Center (IDRC), has commissioned our team to conduct a survey on data sharing practices in Africa. To this end, a subset of the countries participating in the Science Granting Councils Initiative in Sub-Saharan Africa has been selected (Uganda, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe). The survey is currently live and available in English, French and Portuguese.

This is not the first survey on data sharing in Africa; we have identified several surveys related to open science, open data, and open access developed over the years. But the issues with this Increasing amount of surveys are: 1) huge amount of data collected are not interoperable; 2) high diversity in: focus (motivations, practices, barriers); main topics (data sharing, Open Data, Open Science, Responsible Conduct of Research); question style and language.

Our survey is unique by the fact that it has been designed to be: 1) interoperable at national (different universities inside the country), regional (african countries) and international levels; 2) reusable for all African countries, regardless of language (English, French or Portuguese); 3) fully or partially reproducible at minimal cost; 4) collectively and collaboratively updated and strengthened. In other words, our survey is intended to be a common tool at the service of the community of African researchers.

As summarized in the following figure(), our survey can strongly contribute to advance open science in Africa, according to the three dimensions of openness : openness to publications/research; openness to society ; openness to excluded knowledges and epistemologies.

Undoubtedly, this survey could provide a robust panafrican dataset allowing researchers, research institutions, funders, policymakers to have a clear picture of data sharing practices from the African context. That is why it is so important to take this survey, disseminate it continuously and propose ways to improve the questions and databank.