Our guests Dawit Tegbaru and Emily Esten from Knowledge Futures Group, shared insights about fostering trust through interoperable preprint review metadata with Docmaps and advancing open publishing with community services.

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Session summary

The webinar hosted by the Knowledge Futures Group, featuring Emily Esten and Dawit Tegbaru, focused on leveraging digital infrastructure to empower African communities in publishing documents and data effectively. Central to their vision is providing open, community-driven, and user-friendly tools that enable local ownership of knowledge platforms, allowing African researchers and organizations to share and preserve scholarly work in ways that reflect their unique languages, values, and needs, free from reliance on proprietary systems.

The session highlighted PubPub, an open-source collaborative publishing platform that facilitates the creation of journals, books, blogs, and data repositories tailored to diverse African contexts. Accessibility was underscored as a key design principle, emphasizing lightweight platforms optimized for low bandwidth, multilingual capabilities, and adaptability to both academic and non-academic environments. This inclusive, community-centered approach ensures digital tools evolve in response to local feedback.

A significant innovation discussed was DocMaps, a framework that fosters trust through interoperable preprint review metadata by making peer review processes transparent and machine-readable. This enables greater discoverability and credibility of research outputs.

Knowledge Futures Group collaborates closely with governments, NGOs, universities, and grassroots organizations to co-create sustainable digital infrastructure, currently with strong engagement in East Africa and plans for expansion throughout the continent. The session inspired African researchers and institutions to move beyond mere users to become co-creators and leaders in developing scholarly publishing innovations that deepen local knowledge ecosystems and advance open science across Africa.

Resources and demonstrations for DocMaps and PubPub were shared, supporting ongoing community-building efforts in African scholarly communication.

Speakers’ profiles

Emily Esten is the Project Lead at Knowledge Futures.

In her varied work experience – from project lead to curator, educator to site developer – her primary focus has been on engaging with audiences, content, and tools to build better research and teaching communities. She has played an active role in shaping collaborations, training, and programming around digital tools for scholarly communication.

In addition to her day-to-day work, she has done freelance site development for Contingent Magazine and Journey75 at the Mark Twain House & Museum. She previously served as Director of Communications for the National Emerging Museum Professionals Network.

LinkedIn: /emilyesten/
ORCID: 0000-0002-1120-1698

Dawit Tegbaru is the Director of Community Publishing Services at Knowledge Futures Group, where he plays a pivotal role in helping communities establish robust publishing workflows and high-quality outputs with editorial, production, and content enrichment services. Drawing from his extensive experience in managing publications for various societies, Dawit is deeply committed to advocacy and inclusivity in scholarly communications. He works with a dedicated team to develop innovative tech, services, and strategic partnerships that promote equitable knowledge exchange and help shape the landscape of academic publishing.

LinkedIn: /dawit-tegbaru/
ORCID: 0000-0002-5096-2991

Related resources

• Knowledge Futures website: https://www.knowledgefutures.org/
• DocMaps
• Homepage: https://docmaps.knowledgefutures.org/
• Technical Documentation: https://docmaps-project.github.io/docmaps/
• DocMaps Demo: https://docmaps-project.github.io/docmaps/demo/index.html
• Current Status: https://docmaps.knowledgefutures.org/pub/rzs117ct/release/1

About the webinar series

This webinar was co-organized by UbuntuNet Alliance and Access 2 Perspectives as part of the ORCID Global Participation Program.

ORCID is the persistent identifier for researchers to share their accomplishments (research articles, data, etc with funding agencies, publishers, data repositories, and other research workflows.

AfricArXiv is a community-led digital archive for African research communication. By enhancing the visibility of African research, we enable discoverability and collaboration opportunities for African scientists on the continent as well as globally.