Toluwase holds a doctorate degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Western Ontario, Canada. He worked at the University of Ibadan (Nigeria's leading university) as an academic librarian, mostly in the medical library. As an academic librarian in a medical library in Nigeria's foremost university, he saw how the absence of a central database for research in Africa affected knowledge gathering for evidence-based medicine. There was no knowledge discovery system where researchers could search and retrieve the research on local health and biomedical challenges their colleagues in Nigeria, or other African have published in African journals. Hence, researchers only rely on the popular research indexing databases such as MEDLINE, Web of Science and Scopus that index less than 10% of journals from Africa.

He has more than ten years experience in information organization, and research communications research, with interest in research communication in Africa. He (co)-authored more than five research communications on the under-representation of research from Africa in the existing research indexing databases and inequality in global science research communications. He has a strong passion for African values, and he believes mostly what Africa needs to do to solve most of its problems is to harness the power of existing technologies.

David Mills is Associate Professor in the department of Education at the University of Oxford, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Global Higher Education. He is a Co-Investigator on CGHE’s Project 9 mapping the supranational higher education space, and carried out work on Africa-China doctoral mobility and research links.

He also writes about the political economy of the global science communication system. His most recent book is ‘Who Counts: Ghanaian Academic Publishing and Global Science’, co-written with colleagues from the University of Ghana and Oxford, and available open access from African Minds.

Sodiq is a PhD Candidate in the Library and Information Science program at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, Western University, Canada. He holds bachelor's and master’s degrees in Library, Archival, and Information Studies from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, with distinctions. Due to his upbringing in the cosmopolitan cities of Lagos and Ibadan, Nigeria, he was exposed to different ethnicities, beliefs, and cultures and the diverse information-sharing modes among these groups. According to him, information sharing is essential to ensuring that individuals and groups express their cultural, linguistic, social, and religious identities within a framework of shared citizenship. As our society becomes increasingly diverse, we must incorporate all groups’ views in our everyday information use through the lens of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Decolonization (EDID). Prior to his Ph.D. program, he worked as a Librarian at a foremost human capacity development firm in Nigeria, where he coordinated the research library and its research activities. His current Ph.D. research examines how the Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Decolonization (EDID) initiatives, collection policies, and strategies of Canadian Research Universities Libraries could address diversity issues and the limited representation of equity-deserving groups in the libraries’ collections.

Sodiq is a member of the Language & Information Technology Research Lab (LiT.RL) which aims to improve access to information by developing language models, methods, and software for human-like understanding of texts through Natural Language Processing (NLP). He invites you to visit the LiT.RL webpage to learn more about its innovative projects.