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Introduction Leveraging data science could significantly advance the understanding of the health impacts of climate change and air pollution to meet health systems’ needs and improve public health in Africa. This scoping review will aim to identify and synthesise evidence on the use of data science as an intervention to address climate change and air pollution-related health challenges in Africa.Methods and analysis The search strategy will be developed, and the search will be conducted in the Web of Science, Scopus, CAB Abstracts, MEDLINE and EMBASE electronic databases. We will also search the reference lists of eligible articles for additional records. We will screen titles, technical reports, abstracts and full texts and select studies reporting the use of data science in relation to the health effects and interventions associated with climate change and air pollution in Africa.Ethics and dissemination There are no formal ethics requirements as we are not collecting primary data. Results, once published, will be disseminated via conferences and shared with policy-makers and public health, air pollution and climate change key stakeholders in Africa.

Open science (OS) is currently dominated by a small subset of practices that occur late in the scientific process. Early career researchers (ECRs) will play a key role in transitioning the scientific community to more widespread use of OS from pre-registration to publication, but they also face unique challenges in adopting these practices. Here, we discuss these challenges across the OS life cycle. Our essay relies on the published literature, an informal survey of 32 ECRs from 14 countries, and discussions among members of the Global Working Group on Open Science (Global Young Academy and National Young Academies). We break the OS life cycle into four stages—study design and tracking (pre-registration, open processes), data collection (citizen science, open hardware, open software, open data), publication (open access publishing, open peer review, open data), and outreach (open educational resources, citizen science)—and map potential barriers at each stage. The most frequently discussed barriers across the OS life cycle were a lack of awareness and training, prohibitively high time commitments, and restrictions and/or a lack of incentives by supervisors. We found that OS practices are highly fragmented and that awareness is particularly low for OS practices that occur during the study design and tracking stage, possibly creating ‘path-dependencies’ that reduce the likelihood of OS practices at later stages. We note that, because ECRs face unique barriers to adopting OS, there is a need for specifically targeted policies such as mandatory training at the graduate level and promotion incentives.