Exploring the global visibility of African scholarly communication: a comparative analysis of open access repositories in Africa

Purpose: This paper is a comparative study of repositories in Africa for the global visibility of African scholarly communication. It aims to provide a detailed description and comparison of repositories in Africa by region, country, repository type, year established, content type, software type, and language of content. Design/methodology/approach: Using a systematic content review methodology, and a total enumerative sampling technique, a total of 259African repositories drawn from the Directory of Open Access Repositories database over one week were reviewed. Findings: The study revealed that out of the 5,905 repositories listed, 259 are from Africa. The repositories are spread across 24 out of the 54 countries that make up the continent, thus making a 44% representation of African scholarly communication by countries in the global space. By region, Eastern Africa had the highest number at 101 (39%) repositories invariably becoming the African region with the most visible scholarly communication, while Central Africa had the least number of OARs at 1 (.4%). By countries, South Africa took the top of other countries at 51 (20%) repositories, while Cameroon was the least at 1 (0.3%). The African scholarly communication with the most visibility is Social Sciences at 223 while the least archived subject is Mathematics at 176. African scholarly communications made available on the global space are mostly generated by institutions of learning as the study shows that 243 (94%) OARs in Africa are institutional repositories. Originality/value: The study exposed the paltry contribution of African repositories in ensuring the global visibility of African scholarly communication. It reveals the weakness of the African continent in exploring the potential of OARs in the wider dissemination of their scholarly communication. Africa has the second-largest population in the world, and ought to generate more scholarly communication in the global space. To this end, therefore, the study recommends among others that African institutions should commit to establishing and maintaining OARs if African scholarly communication will be visible in the global space.