An Examination of Challenges and Opportunities in African Publishing and Its Accelerating Presence on the World Stage
June 10, 2019 – Danvers, Mass. – Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), a leader in advancing copyright, accelerating knowledge, and powering innovation, is sponsoring and participating in the International Publishers Association’s (IPA) conference on “Africa Rising: Realizing Africa’s Potential as a Global Publishing Leader in the 21st Century” in Nairobi, Kenya, 14-15 June.
Through initiatives of this kind, CCC partners with like-minded organizations to foster copyright and licensing as essential ingredients of healthy, sustainable, and effective publishing industries.
“The emergence in the developing world of a vibrant academic and scholarly publishing industry that supports and promotes local research requires that critical elements are in place,” said Tracey Armstrong, President and CEO, CCC. “First and foremost is respect for the importance of copyright to protect and encourage innovation. We also need licensing mechanisms to enable legal sharing of content within universities and schools.”
Under the auspices of its International Advancement Program, CCC has supported collective licensing bodies in Ghana, the Philippines, Zambia, Jamaica, and Argentina, helping them build organizations, systems, and processes to enable licensing of academic and scholarly content in local universities and schools. The program offers a range of support based on local needs, such as training, mentoring, and providing customized materials and resources. A good example of this work is where CCC helped establish the local Reproduction Rights Organization of Ghana, CopyGhana.
“Back in 2014, the leadership of what was then a nascent organization told CCC it needed two things to set up an effective licensing scheme for the country’s universities and polytechnics,” said Michael Healy, Executive Director, International Relations, CCC. “First, it needed an agreement to represent in its academic licenses the rights repertoire represented by CCC. Second, it asked for training in how to build, promote, and sell licenses to Ghana’s academic institutions. CCC provided both the agreement and the training.”
“Five years later, CopyGhana is flourishing. Ghana’s universities and polytechnics have an infrastructure in which they can legally share and re-use copyrighted content from local and international publishers,” said Healy. “Such an infrastructure protects publishers’ and authors’ rights and rewards them for the re-use of their work. It also helps to support local scholarship and research by facilitating the legal sharing of content.”