The Power of Open Science

A presentation delivered as a session within the LIBSENSE ECR Network Leadership Workshop — the two-day pilot programme for Nigerian early-career researchers. The deck makes the case that open science is a strategic lever rather than a philosophical preference for African researchers, and organises that case around four reinforcing pillars: accessibility (removing financial and institutional gatekeeping), visibility (citation advantage, persistent identifiers, discoverability), reproducibility (sharing data, code and protocols to strengthen the credibility of African research), and societal impact (policy influence, public health, community relevance and economic development).

Each pillar is anchored by an African case study: UCT Libraries' diamond open access publishing programme, the South African Journal of Science's 120 years of APC-free publishing, the African Reproducibility Network's ambassador model, H3Africa's openly published genomics governance framework, and the LIBSENSE Open Science Nigeria advocacy group. The final sections translate the material into the participants' own mandate — advocating within their institutions, building campus ECR communities, deploying the co-created open access toolkit, and feeding their experience back into the regional LIBSENSE ECR model before its wider African rollout. Useful for anyone designing open science advocacy training or looking for documented African open science examples.