Brokerage Event Towards a FAIR Compliant Commons in the ASREN Region

 Monday, 7 June 2021

 10:00am – 01:00pm Europe/Rome

Description

National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) in Africa are organised under three umbrella Regional Research and Education Networks (RRENs), namely ASREN in the northern part of the continent as well as in the Middle-East and the Persian Gulf Region, WACREN in the western part of sub-Saharan Africa and the UbuntuNet Alliance in the eastern part of sub-Saharan Africa.

All African RRENs are very much committed not only to increase and capillarize connectivity among countries across the continent but also, and more importantly in the long term, to create a portfolio of services that could help and improve the collaboration between African researchers and their colleagues in the rest of the world, bridging the gaps in openness of research [1] and visibility of research outputs [2]. In this respect, the support of the European Union, through large projects like AfricaConnect3, and initiatives like LIBSENSE, in the area of digital repositories and Open Science more at large, play key roles.

This event, which is part of the programme of the 16th International Conference on Open Repositories (OR2021), framed itself in this landscape of actions. It aimed at promoting FAIR principles compliant commons such as digital repositories and persistent identifiers for both researchers and their research outputs. However, what made this event different from similar ones is its innovative co-creation methodology. We aimed at bringing in the same virtual place solution seekers, solution providers, policy makers and end users to trigger new collaborations and we proposed a “try before you buy” approach.

The length of the event was 3 hours divided in three parts: a 80 minutes Workshop session, a 30 minutes Brokerage session, and a 70 minutes Hands-on tutorial.