Joy Owango is the Executive Director of TCC Africa, an award-winning trust established in 2006 to strengthen research capacity, scholarly communication, and Open Science across Africa. Over the years, she has become a recognized leader in advancing research visibility, digital research infrastructure, and equitable participation in global scholarly ecosystems. Through her work, she collaborates with universities, research institutions, funders, policymakers, and international organizations to enhance the discoverability, accessibility, and impact of African research. At TCC Africa, Joy provides strategic leadership for programmes focused on Open Science advocacy, research capacity strengthening, scholarly communication, digital research infrastructure, and research management systems. Her work supports institutions in adopting interoperable and sustainable approaches to research information management, while helping researchers increase the visibility and influence of their work. She is particularly interested in how emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, can be responsibly integrated into research ecosystems to strengthen knowledge creation, sharing, and impact. A strong advocate for Open Science, Joy has led numerous continental and international initiatives that promote collaboration, transparency, and equitable access to research. Her efforts focus on ensuring that African researchers and institutions are not only consumers of global knowledge systems but also active contributors to their design, governance, and future development. Joy is also a leading voice in advancing Persistent Identifier (PID) infrastructure in Africa through the Africa PID Alliance, a programme of TCC Africa that promotes the adoption of standards-based, interoperable research infrastructure. The Alliance works to connect researchers, institutions, funders, grants, projects, datasets, publications, and other research outputs through globally recognized identifier systems, thereby improving research discoverability, accountability, and impact assessment across the continent. Central to this work is DOCiD™ (Digital Object Container Identifier), an innovative framework she is helping to develop and advance. DOCiD extends the traditional role of persistent identifiers by creating machine-actionable digital containers that connect research objects with their provenance, relationships, permissions, contextual information, and metadata. By linking people, organizations, grants, datasets, publications, Indigenous Knowledge resources, and other scholarly assets, DOCiD contributes to the development of trusted, interoperable, and AI-ready research ecosystems. The framework aligns with FAIR and CARE principles and supports Open Science implementation, Indigenous Knowledge stewardship, research impact tracking, and responsible knowledge sharing. Beyond her leadership roles, Joy contributes to several international advisory and community initiatives that shape the future of research infrastructure and scholarly communication. She is actively engaged with the Research Organization Registry (ROR), the International Science Council (ISC), and the Research Data Alliance (RDA), where she contributes to global discussions on research interoperability, Open Science, digital infrastructure, and research data governance. Through her work at TCC Africa, the Africa PID Alliance, and DOCiD, Joy is helping to build a more connected, trusted, and inclusive global research ecosystem—one in which African scholarship, institutions, and knowledge systems are fully visible, interoperable, and positioned to contribute meaningfully to the future of science, innovation, and AI-enabled knowledge discovery.
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