Strategic Collaboration Aims to Improve the Matching of Organizations with Research Outputs for Institutions Affiliated with the Africa PID Alliance
July 30, 2025 – Danvers, Mass. – CCC, a leader in advancing copyright, accelerating knowledge, and powering innovation, has announced a strategic collaboration agreement with the Training Centre in Communication (TCC – Africa) to support the identification of organization affiliations to help improve the tracking of research output from African institutions.
TCC Africa’s Open Infrastructure program includes the Africa PID Alliance, whose mission is to secure the future of African innovation, indigenous knowledge, and cultural heritage. It supports scientists and inventors in disseminating and commercializing their research innovations.
CCC’s leading persistent identifier (PID)-based solution, Ringgold, contains more than 750,000 records of global organizations engaged in scholarly research. Ringgold has been trusted by 80 publishers, service providers, and funders for more than 20 years. TCC Africa will use a subset of Ringgold organization data within the Digital Object Container Identifier (DOCiD). CCC will incorporate updates to African institutions in the Ringgold database.
“CCC continues to support cross-stakeholder initiatives within the scholarly communications ecosystem,” said Emily Sheahan, Vice President & Managing Director, CCC. “This collaboration with TCC Africa demonstrates CCC’s commitment to backing initiatives that drive further adoption of PIDs, enable interoperability across internal and external systems, and provide researchers, librarians, organizations, and other users with the flexibility to select the identifier system(s) that best fit their needs.”
“DOCID™ was created to ensure African research outputs, especially indigenous and cultural heritage knowledge, are accurately attributed and contextually grounded,” said Joy Owango, Project Lead at the Africa PID Alliance. “Integrating Ringgold data through this collaboration with CCC strengthens that mission, positioning African scholarship and innovation more visibly within global knowledge systems.”
CCC advocates for copyright worldwide by engaging governments, stakeholders, and individuals with educational programming and thought leadership resources. The organization also maintains an online hub, AI, Copyright & Licensing, which features informational resources for creators, publishers, rightsholders, technologists, media representatives, policymakers, intellectual property attorneys, and others.
Since 1978, CCC has supported content users by providing efficient, harmonized licensing solutions for their internal content uses. CCC’s non-exclusive voluntary collective licensing solutions include ACL for Business, Multinational Copyright License (MCL) for Business, ACL for Higher Education, ACL for Curriculum & Instruction, and ACL for Student Assessments. In addition to licensing solutions, CCC provides one-stop access for users to request, receive, and pay for full-text content and permissions to re-use content.