Paper short abstract:

Two major collections of dissertations and theses defended at the universities of Burkina Faso have been made available open access.Access data analysis shows the visibility and the impact on the Internet of scientific documents produced by African Institutions.

Paper long abstract:

Two major collections of dissertations and theses defended at the University of Bobo Dioulasso and the University of Ouagadougou 1 have been made available open access on the Internet.

The data analysis of accesses available via the host server makes it possible to produce several indicators concerning the impact and the international visibility of the available documents.

We will present the temporal and geographical distribution of the consultations, the specific frequencies for each document, the nature of the questions, the impact of the search engines.

These results seem to show that by making available on the Internet scientific documents produced by African institutions their visibility and impact are demonstrable with the data collected by the server.

Comparison of these data with those available for the open access documents of the French Institute for Development (IRD) show that the levels of consultation for scientific publications from "North" and "South" countries are quite similar.