June 5, 2021 Presentation Open Access

Brokerage Event Towards a FAIR Compliant Commons in the ASREN Region - The Somalia Experience

Ahmed, Mohamed Ali;; Barbera, Roberto; Siyad, Ahmed; Hussein, Abdullahi B.

Like many other countries in Africa, Somalia suffers from a gap with respect to other countries in the world for what concerns openness of research and visibility of research outputs. Research outputs produced by local universities and research institutions are not adequately showcased to interested communities and citizens outside academic institutions and this has negatively branded the local institutions as in-competent to produce any form of research contents. As an example, printed copies of students' theses and dissertations are usually archived inside the university and nobody is basically able to see them after the defending day.

In order to overcome this problem and bridge the above-mentioned gaps, the Somali National Research and Education Network (SomaliREN), which gathers 20 universities and research institutions from all over the country, is developing a program based on three strategic pillars: connectivity, community, and content. Under the latter, SomaliREN has launched an initiative to deploy a centralized open access multi-institutional digital repository, and the Somali Research and Education Repository (SORER) has recently come online.