Strengthening Indigenous Academic and Digital Publishing in Tanzania (TZAP)
The two-year project ‘Strengthening Indigenous Academic and Digital Publishing in Tanzania’ (TZAP) aimed to contribute to a knowledge-based society in Tanzania by increasing the quality of academic publishing, through training, skills development and capacity development.
TZAP was run as a pilot project within SRKS to explore the potential to strengthen academic publishing at a national level, by bringing together different organization and providing training and support in digital publishing skills. It also provided an opportunity to explore the possibility of collaborating with Northern publishers to support Southern publishing.
Responding to a growing demand in Tanzania to ‘go digital’, TZAP conducted training and workshops for commercial and university publishers in topics such as Digital Publishing and Marketing and Communication. In addition, the project aimed to strengthen local umbrella organizations to serve as national representatives of scientific research and the publishing industry.
Achievements of the TZAP project
- Conducted a thorough assessment of the needs of academic and private-sector publishers, which provided the basis for the training plan.
- Delivered 10 multi-day workshops around digital publishing, as well as marketing and communication, reaching over 181 participants (24% female).
- Organized 12 shorter presentation sessions around plagiarism, research writing and open access, reaching over 350 participants (32% female).
- Convened and founded the national Consortium of Academic Publishers.
These activities contributed to sensitizing a wide audience on important topics around open access, digital publishing and marketing, digital repositories and print on demand.
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Blog: Launch of the Consortium of Academic Publishers in Tanzania
