By the FRELIP Editorial Team
Open science aims to make research more transparent, collaborative, and accessible — but its benefits are not evenly shared if participation is not. This briefing focuses on women in African open science: the contributions women researchers make across disciplines, the structural barriers that can limit visibility and advancement, and why inclusive open science is stronger science. We will discuss how open access, persistent identifiers, and equitable publishing models can either widen or narrow participation gaps depending on how they are implemented, and why building an open scholarly commons that reflects the full breadth of African talent is both a fairness question and a quality question.