Eko-Konnect is pleased to announce a collaboration with Coko Foundation to pilot Kotahi in the Nigerian community open science cloud for research and education. Kotahi is a modern publishing platform that manages the submission, review, and publication of preprints, micropubs, and journals at reduced costs.  More at: https://coko.foundation/announcement-kotahi-joins-eko-konnect-pilot/ 

The community cloud – The community cloud addresses some of the digital infrastructure deficit in Nigeria by providing ubiquitous access for the R&E community to a number of services and shared platforms utilising digital identity for secure and seamless access to the services hosted in the community cloud to improve education, research productivity and output.

The cloud services catalog currently contains the following services:

• Federated Identity and Access Management – eduID.ng
  Provides a secure and privacy-preserving trust fabric for research and higher education institutions and their service provider partners ensuring secure access, and easy deployment of institutions Identity Provider to connect to a growing number of online services and platforms.
• eduroam (education roaming) 
  eduroam is the secure, worldwide roaming WI-Fi access service developed for the international research and education community. eduroam provides students, researchers and staff from participating institutions with Internet access across their own campus and when visiting other participating institutions by simply using their mobile devices or laptops.
• Hybrid Learning and Collaboration
  This includes a suite of integrated tools based on Moodle, video-conferencing and an OER repository that offers a blended teaching and learning solution for education and research institutions in the post Covid-19 era. An ongoing partnership with JISC, the UK NREN is identifying areas where digital literacy and digital capability for individuals and institutions can be improved in order to develop a sustainable framework. This will address other challenges beyond infrastructure such as improved pedagogy and instructional design skills for e-learning delivery that underpin these services.

Eko-Konnect will conduct a soft launch of the community-driven National Open Science Cloud by the end of Q3 when the following services being piloted are ready for release.

Research Data Management Platform – Eko-Konnect is part of the development team building a Research Data Management Platform based on InvenioRDM and led by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research(CERN). The turn-key research data management repository will be piloted as a national repository that researchers, librarians and other stakeholders in Nigerian research can exploit for increased collaboration and improved monitoring and visibility of research outputs. The platform which will be available for use in the second half of the year will also harvest content from institutions that may already have standards-compliant Open Access repositories.

Open Access Journal Publishing Platform – The publishing and visibility of journals by African academics has been a significant challenge. The Kotahi service will provide a one-stop publishing platform with highly configurable workflows to make publishing and discovery of research and scholarly output from our researchers and academics much easier and cheaper.

Academic CSIRT – The increased access to digital services by the R&E necessitated by the pandemic has also meant increased dangers from those who mean harm to the security of networks and data and privacy. NRENs and their constituent institutions and campuses need to enhance their cybersecurity and protect their digital assets by establishing computer incident security incident response teams (CSIRTs) to counter the potential threats. Eko-Konnect aims to exploit participation in the TrustBroker Africa initiative to establish academic CSIRTs.

Finally, as part of the LIBSENSE National Open Science Roadmaps, Eko-Konnect will stage a series of workshops and meetings with stakeholders to onboard institutions into the cloud, promote Open Science and establish an action plan. A presentation at the recently held WACREN 2021 conference details some of the activities and our aspirations.