Open Access Workshop

An Open Access workshop will be held in Nairobi, Kenya, led by members of the Research Informatics Unit (RIU) and the Sweetpotato Action for Security and Health in Africa (SASHA). The five-day workshop has been divided into two sections as follows: 

• A one-day session explaining the implementation of OA at CIP. This session is targeting key research staff across all CIP-SSA programs.
• A four-day hands-on session where staff will be taught how to upload research data on CIP’s OA data repository, Dataverse. Training will be given over the four days on how to prepare data for OA publishing, including how to write appropriate meta-data. Every participant in this four-day session is required to bring along data from their respective programs. SASHA scientists are expected to bring along datasets from the past five years. The suggested data set you will be working on is linked to your name in the attached Excel spreadsheet of participants.

The primary goal of the workshop is to help participants understand the key practices and procedures for OA and Research Data Management. The intended outcome is to have curated datasets from the last five years ready to be published in Dataverse. The second goal is to put in place OA focal points in SSA who will regularly contribute to uploading project datasets into Dataverse.

As part of the pre-workshop, participants will be expected to provide information about their current data management practices, perceived data management norms in their fields and their future data management plans. Participants are also expected to have completed the online OA training on http://cipotato.org/open-access/. All sessions and the workshop report will be downloadable from http://cipotato.org/open-access/