Landscape Analysis of PID Infrastructure and Awareness in Sub-Saharan Africa

Persistent identifiers (PIDs) play a crucial role in ensuring the longevity and accessibility of digital resources. In sub-Saharan Africa, the landscape regarding PIDs has been evolving to address various challenges related to research, data management, and access. This work focussed on analyzing the PID infrastructure and awareness in sub-Saharan Africa. DataCite observed a lower representation of some regions in their DOI infrastructure. Africa, as a region, is one of the observed regions with a lesser number of DOIs originating from the region as well as underlying repository infrastructure. The aim of the report is to have an understanding of the Open Science infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa and  the objectives include:

1. Review of existing works on PID infrastructure in the region

2. Ascertain the level of PID infrastructure awareness in the region

3. Identify the existing gaps and make suggestions to close these gaps.

This report covers a review of existing persistent identifiers for scholarly works, as well as the extent of awareness of these identifiers in sub-Saharan Africa. The data used in this landscape analysis were taken from several sources including ROAR, DOAR, Re3data, and UNESCO. The study observed the extent of PID infrastructure availability in the region using the data from trusted public sources and assessed PID awareness across different countries based on the available data. Although there are different types of PIDs such as ROR (Research Organization Registry) which is used to identify research institutions, and ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) which is used to identify individual researchers, this study focused mostly on DOIs, which are used to identify research outputs, and the state of the awareness in sub-Saharan Africa. 

This report is relevant to multi-stakeholders in the open science ecosystem. It will be resourceful for policy makers to identify the gaps in their respective countries, provide improved visibility to funders on how to support and collaborate within the region on the institutionalization of open science and its infrastructure, serve as a source of further study for researchers, while partners and stakeholders in the open science ecosystems will  have a baseline to provide the necessary support for the region.