Open Science Practices among Universities in Kenya: Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract

Science is data-driven however access to scientific data often possess a challenge to scientist. Scientific data is often subject to legal and privacy regulations, restrictive institutional policies, in addition to weak incentives for researchers to share data. There have been concerted efforts to promote openness in research through encouraging open science among researchers. This chapter analyses open science practices, opportunities and challenges among universities in Kenya. The study on which this chapter is based employed a descriptive survey research design using an online questionnaire through Google forms to collect data from researchers in universities in Kenya. Data was collected from 34 universities. A majority of the respondents 55% were familiar with some aspects of open science such as open access, open source software and open data, most of them were not aware of open peer review and open notebook concepts. Over 70% of the respondents are involved in open access publishing while only a few are involved in other forms of open science. The benefits of open science include sharing knowledge, enabling collaboration and wider dissemination of research outputs. Therefore, Open science practices should be encouraged as a panacea to scholarly crisis and publishing channels needs to be encouraged among researchers. Recommendations made in this chapter may be helpful to all stakeholders in the research workflow to develop open science practices among universities in Kenya.