CCC and the Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa) Team Up to Improve Identification of African Institutions Driving Innovation in Scholarly Research

Strategic Collaboration Aims to Improve the Matching of Organizations with Research Outputs for Institutions Affiliated with the Africa PID Alliance

DANVERS, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--CCC, a leader in advancing copyright, accelerating knowledge, and powering innovation, has announced a strategic collaboration agreement with the Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa) to support the identification of organization affiliations to help improve the tracking of research output from African institutions.

TCC Africa’s Open Infrastructure program includes the Africa PID Alliance, whose mission is to secure the future of African innovation, indigenous knowledge, and cultural heritage. It supports scientists and inventors in disseminating and commercializing their research innovations.

CCC’s leading persistent identifier (PID)-based solution, Ringgold, contains more than 750,000 records of global organizations engaged in scholarly research. Ringgold has been trusted by 80 publishers, service providers, and funders for more than 20 years. TCC Africa will use a subset of Ringgold organization data within the Digital Object Container Identifier (DOCiD). CCC will incorporate updates to African institutions in the Ringgold database.

“CCC continues to support cross-stakeholder initiatives within the scholarly communications ecosystem,” said Emily Sheahan, Vice President & Managing Director, CCC. “This collaboration with TCC Africa demonstrates CCC’s commitment to backing initiatives that drive further adoption of PIDs, enable interoperability across internal and external systems, and provide researchers, librarians, organizations, and other users with the flexibility to select the identifier system(s) that best fit their needs.”

“DOCID™ was created to ensure African research outputs, especially indigenous and cultural heritage knowledge, are accurately attributed and contextually grounded,” said Joy Owango, Project Lead at the Africa PID Alliance. “Integrating Ringgold data through this collaboration with CCC strengthens that mission, positioning African scholarship and innovation more visibly within global knowledge systems.”

CCC advocates for copyright worldwide by engaging governments, stakeholders, and individuals with educational programming and thought leadership resources. The organization also maintains an online hub, AI, Copyright & Licensing, which features informational resources for creators, publishers, rightsholders, technologists, media representatives, policymakers, intellectual property attorneys, and others.

Since 1978, CCC has supported content users by providing efficient, harmonized licensing solutions for their internal content uses. CCC’s non-exclusive voluntary collective licensing solutions include ACL for Business, Multinational Copyright License (MCL) for Business, ACL for Higher Education, ACL for Curriculum & Instruction, and ACL for Student Assessments. In addition to licensing solutions, CCC provides one-stop access for users to request, receive, and pay for full-text content and permissions to re-use content.

About CCC (Copyright Clearance Center)
A pioneer in voluntary collective licensing, CCC has been dedicated to advancing copyright, accelerating knowledge, and powering innovation since its inception in 1978. Today, CCC supports a thriving knowledge economy as a trusted intermediary, providing licensing solutions that make copyright work, including collective licensing solutions for the use of copyrighted materials with AI systems. CCC also offers a portfolio of innovative and complementary software solutions, as well as high-quality content, data, and information services.

About the Africa PID Alliance
The Africa PID Alliance is the Open Infrastructure program of the Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa), dedicated to securing the future of African innovation, indigenous knowledge, and cultural heritage. It provides trusted open research infrastructure services that enhance access to knowledge and metadata about digital objects, with a strong focus on Africa’s unique contributions to global research. https://africapidalliance.org/