Our vision for having works by Kenyan researchers publicly available and accessible has been realized by the upgrade of our Research Infrastructures. Research Infrastructures (RIs) are the facilities, resources and services used by the science community to conduct research and foster innovation. By putting together efforts and developing RIs for the community, KENET’s long term goal is to improve the overall research productivity of the country.

KENET provides free research services such as Certification Authority (CA), Identity Provider (IDP) and the Open Access Data Repository (OADR) to the research community in higher learning and research institutions. The CA is an entity which issues Digital Certificates to researchers who wish to access High Performance Computing or storage available through a global grid infrastructure. These services enable researchers to collaborate, exchange and publish their works with other researchers worldwide.

KENET has held trainings to guide users on how to use the digital certificates on the grid. The KENET IDP is a member of the Africa Inter-Federation service that allows users to authenticate to various resources on the Internet with the use of one ID issued by the IDP. At KENET, we are already making a number of services available through federated login e.g. the OADR (a digital platform that holds research output and provides free, immediate and permanent access to research results for anyone to use, download and distribute), and Events system (meetings, conferences, lectures). The service is already up and running awaiting official launch. The data uploaded will all be tagged with unique OID (Object Identifier) which will be registered internationally. Researchers using the work downloaded can then reference the OID in their work as reference.
 

KENET OADR

The KENET Open Access Digital Repository (OADR) is a Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) that takes care of the management of digital assets like spreadsheets, photographs, audio files, video files, representations of artwork, diagrams, satellite images and charts among others.

Research data is increasingly being created in digital form and repositories provide the means for collecting the data that underpin peer-reviewed articles. More and more research funders are requiring their grant-holders to make their data Open Access, once they have analyzed and published their findings from the data. The KENET OADR provides upto 10TB of storage, federated access through the KENET IDP and is available through the KENET high speed broadband network.