Ghana experience in making e-journals and e-publishing widely used by local research community

Helena Asamoah Hassan, eIFL country coordinator for Ghana, and Agatha T. Frempong discuss at the paper "Access to E-Journals and E-Publishing Initiatives in Ghana: Successes, challenges and lessons learnt" the work done so far in Ghana to promote enhanced access and usage of e-journals and to enable more visibility of local research through e-publishing.

E-journals and e-publishing were introduced to the local research community in 2002 and 2004 respectively and ever since a number of initiatives have been put in place for their further development and sustainability. In concrete, the paper remarks the important contributions by the library community by explaining the role of the national library consortia CARLIGH and giving an overview of cooperation with a few international initiatives, such as eIFL.net, to enable access to top scholarly e-resources, train librarians, local editors and researchers and raise awareness on matters related to open repositories and electronic publishing. Last but not least, the authors refer to the challenges that appeared in the process of making e-journals and e-publishing better known and managed locally, including infrastructure and advocacy considerations, copyright issues in a digital environment and the need for further training.

This paper was presented at the Conference on Electronic Publishing and Dissemination in Dakar, Senegal, on October 6-7, 2008 and is fully available here.