Dominic Agyei Dankwah
Dr Dominic Dankwah Agyei is a practising librarian at the University of Health and Allied Sciences, Ghana, where he heads the E-Resources and Training Department. Dominic leads the LIBSENSE ECR Group in Ghana, and also chairs the working group on Open Science and Open Publishing at Public Health Africa (PHA). He is the 2024 MLA Cunningham Fellow. His research interests span open science, open access publishing, research data management, and policy issues in minority languages. Follow his publications here.
Session
Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) are critical infrastructure for open science, yet their adoption across Africa remains uneven. In this presentation you will discover the challenges to PID adoption in Ghanaian Higher Education Institutions (HEI), offering insights for keeping knowledge connected. Drawing on interviews, policy analysis, and institutional case studies, we identify interoperability gaps, limited awareness, cost constraints, and fragmented governance/policies as key barriers. Legacy systems and inconsistent metadata practices further impede integration with global PID ecosystems. Despite these constraints, library-led initiatives, and researcher champions demonstrate scalable pathways forward. We propose actionable recommendations: coordinated policy frameworks, sustainable funding models, capacity building, and regional collaboration to align with initiatives like ORCID, ROR, and Crossref. By strengthening PID infrastructure, Ghanaian institutions can enhance research visibility, trust, and, advancing open science across Africa. This study highlights implications for PIDfest stakeholders seeking inclusive, interoperable knowledge systems that transcend institutional and continental boundaries for impact.