Building Inclusive AI Systems Through African Open Access Research

Open access is increasingly important in the age of AI because digital discovery systems and AI-enabled tools rely heavily on accessible, machine-readable, and well-described research. UNESCO’s open science framework supports making scientific knowledge as open as possible, while DOAJ notes that open-access journal metadata is used globally in discovery services, search engines, online tools, and AI solutions. When African research is published through credible open-access journals, it has a stronger chance of being found, indexed, read, and used within the wider digital knowledge environment.

This matters for Africa because underrepresented contexts are still at risk of being marginalised in AI systems. Strengthening credible open-access African journals is not only about improving human access to research. It is also about helping ensure that trusted African scholarship is more visible in the digital environment from which AI tools increasingly retrieve, rank, and interpret knowledge. Open access alone will not eliminate AI errors or hallucinations, but it is an important foundation for improving representation, discoverability and access to current African scholarship.