Busara has enhanced its commitment to producing high-quality knowledge outputs by becoming a member of CrossRef. CrossRef describes itself as a ‘not-for-profit membership organization that exists to make scholarly communications better’ by making ‘research objects easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse.’ (Source: https://www.crossref.org)

With membership at CrossRef, Busara joins a scholarly community committed to open science, transparency and originality, as CrossRef puts it: ‘We envision a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society.’ (Source: https://www.crossref.org) Busara joins a community of ‘17,000+ members from 146 countries, 130+ million records, 600+ million monthly metadata queries from thousands of tools across the research ecosystem.’(Source: https://www.crossref.org). 

In practice, the membership means that Busara is committing to assigning a digital object identifier (DOI) to its published outputs, hosting outputs in perpetuity, and contributing to an open community of accountable knowledge sharing.

Joining CrossRef is part of a three-year strategy (2023 – 2026) that emphasizes building Busara’s voice and contribution to knowledge production. ‘As Busara, we have a specific challenge: we want to produce high-quality outputs to share with the research community, but also find our own voice and different ways of honoring and sharing knowledge,’ said Mareike Schomerus, Vice President Voice and Impact. ‘But Busara has until fairly recently been primarily a service deliverer in research by supporting outputs for partners. The new strategy aims to build our voice by developing our own output formats and by consistently sharing the knowledge we gain both from the research we conduct, as well as about what we learn about what it means to build an international Global South research organization.’

‘2023 was an important year for Busara’s voice,’ said Michael Onsando, Busara’s Manager Voice and Impact. ‘We launched Groundwork, our primary publication series. We also consistently shared and promoted our knowledge in other formats, learning how to engage more with our audiences. We are looking forward to learning more about how we can continue to build our transparency and improve the quality of our outputs by being part of the global community committed to accountable and open science as represented by CrossRef.’

The first DOI that Busara will assign with its unique DOI prefix 10.62372 will be for the inaugural Busara Yearbook Tafakari, which brings together scholarly and practical learning and reflection. Here is the Tafakari’s DOI