On Friday March 13, 2015, KENET’s Executive Director Prof. Meoli Kashorda attended an Institutional Repository and Open Content Policy Formulation workshop at Moi University.  The workshop was opened by the director for Quality Assurance, Prof. Laban Ayiro who was representing the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Academic Affairs, Research, and Extension Prof. Bob Wishitemi. The workshop participants discussed their draft institutional repository policy with their internal stakeholders.

The workshop afforded KENET the opportunity to observe the progress made by one of our member universities in the formulation of Open Content policy and in setting up Institutional Repository. Moi University has a strong team of professional librarian’s team and was one of the first universities to have a fully automated library in the 90s.

The following are a few things about Moi University policies and practices that were positive and interesting:

1. Moi University has decided to adopt Open Content Policies and encourage the use of Creative Commons with Attribution licensing framework for all content generated by the university
2. Moi University intends to host their institutional repository in Kenya (University data center or KENET data center). The Kenya Open Data is hosted in the US! KENET can provide the virtual servers and storage required to host the repository. The KENET data center has broadband access in Kenya and abroad and has very high availability (99.99%) which translates to less than 10 minutes downtime per month.
3. Moi University is already using Turnitin Anti-plagiarism software for their post-graduate reports/thesis and for any papers submitted by faculty. Which is a BIG step in fighting plagiarism. We at KENET continue to explore the possibility of open source anti-plagiarism software for ease of adoption.

We shall be circulating a questionnaire to establish the number of institutions that already have an institutional repository, the software platform and how you are dealing with plagiarism of content. Our anecdotal evidence suggests that we have made a lot of progress with institutional repositories and open policies (UoN, KU, SU all have operational repositories).

We encourage all librarians to host their institutional repositories for broadband access by all users outside your campuses in Kenya and abroad. KENET data center has been setup for the benefit of member institutions and the recurrent costs are on a cost-recovery basis and are lower than what Amazon or any other local hosting companies charges.