The Eko-Konnect 2024 Users Conference, the definitive gathering of the Nigerian Research and Education Community took place physically on 23rd January 2024 after a 4-year post-COVID hiatus. This year’s Annual Conference took place at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Lagos with the WACREN Research Data Management workshop co-located with the conference on 24th and 25th January 2024.

Themed: “Empowering Research and Education Ecosystem with Digital and Open Infrastructure”, the Users Conference focused on utilising digital infrastructure and open platforms to improve Scholarly Communications and Open Science practice.

Speakers at the conference discussed utilising Digital and Open Science infrastructures including Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) and Educational Identities to increase the visibility of researchers and their outputs globally making for easier collaboration with the wider global research ecosystem. As a part of its strategy for the year, Eko-Konnect committed to increased support, advocacy and capacity building for R&E communities across the country to develop open science infrastructure, institutional repositories, and use of Persistent Identifiers leveraging partnerships with Datacite and ORCID to increase research visibility and scholarly outputs.

Other activities in the 3-day event include the LIBSENSE Research Data Management workshop managed by WACREN which aims to initiate a coordinated set of activities to strengthen the capacity for and awareness of research data management practices and governance at the institutional level in higher education and research institutions and also an Open Access Book workshop.

For other details of the conference and presentations use the session links below:

Watch the full video of the event…