African Journals OnLine

Last updated
African Journals OnLine
AJOL.jpg
ProducerAfrican Journals OnLine (South Africa)
History1998 to present
Access
Costopen access and subscription
Coverage
Record depthIndex, abstract & full-text
Format coverageJournals
Geospatial coverageAfrica
Links
Website www.ajol.info
Title list(s) www.ajol.info/index.php/index/browse/alpha?letter=all

African Journals OnLine (AJOL) is a South African non-profit organisation, which is in the headquarters of Grahamstown, it is dedicated to improve the online visibility and access to the published scholarly research of African-based academics. By using the internet as a gateway, AJOL aims to enhance conditions for African learning as well as African development.

Contents

Information inequality

Of the 50 least developed countries in the world, 33 are in Africa. [1] There is widespread awareness of the importance of education in addressing poverty in the long term, usually with an emphasis on primary and secondary education. A concurrent focus on higher education on the continent is also needed for African countries to sustainably develop their capacity and economies and lift the region out of underdevelopment.

Primarily due to difficulties accessing them, African research papers have been under-utilised, under-valued and under-cited in the international and African research arenas. To date, the main information resources, published journals and journal articles available to and used by researchers, librarians and students in Africa are the same as those used in Europe and America. This is because information from the developed world is usually more readily available than that of developing countries. However, it does not adequately reflect the research output of Africa and is not always relevant or appropriate for higher education in Africa. Although access to global information resources is essential; equally important and essential is access to the local research output from the continent.

Despite the wide range of capacity and resources within and between African countries, a legitimate generalization is that strengthening research and research-publishing are crucial priorities for improving higher education in Africa. [2] At the same time as information sources from the developed world are currently made available for free to Africa (such as HINARI, AGORA, OARE (Online Access to Research in the Environment), JSTOR African Access Initiative, and Aluka), there needs to be a corresponding focus on the online availability of information from Africa if increased local capacity in research and dissemination is to be attained. To this end, in a high-tech, information hungry and rapidly globalising world, higher education in Africa needs technological tools to share and build on its own research output with neighbouring countries and the rest of the world. [3]

Scholarly journals remain a vital and entrenched means of academic communication. In the information age, providing electronic access to journals is becoming the norm if that research is to reach the international audience who need to be aware of it. Many worthy peer-reviewed scholarly journals publishing from Africa lack the means to host their content online in isolation. Others do have sufficient resources but cannot attain the online visibility necessary to increase awareness of the valuable research contained within. There is a need to support the ongoing functioning and sustainability of journals publishing research from Africa. [4]

Increasing access to African information

The mission of AJOL is to support African research and counter the "North-South" and "West-East" inequality of information flow by facilitating awareness of and access to research published in Africa. [5] Information from developed countries is not necessarily as relevant or appropriate for Africa as that from within the continent. AJOL provides an online system for the aggregation of African-published scholarly journals and offers global access to and visibility of the research output of the continent. As such, AJOL's primary beneficiaries are scholarly, peer-reviewed, African-published journals, and secondary (also direct) beneficiaries are African and international members of the scholarly community needing to access African-published research.

AJOL hosts African-published, peer-reviewed scholarly journals for free – and includes both open access and subscription-based journals. The meta-data of all participating journals is open access on the AJOL website. AJOL also provides an article download service for researchers to access full text of individual articles.

AJOL hosts over 350 peer-reviewed journals from 27 African countries covering a variety of disciplines including health, education, agriculture, science and technology, the environment, and arts and culture. The number of participating journals and researchers using the service is growing continuously. AJOL hopes to eventually include all quality, peer-reviewed journals on the continent.

Countries with journals on AJOL AJOL participant countries Nov-07.jpg
Countries with journals on AJOL

The AJOL website receives over 100,000 visits per month from over 190 countries around the world.

Background

The AJOL project was initiated in 1998 by the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP), a charitable organisation based in Oxford, in the United Kingdom. After a positive evaluation of the pilot in early 2000, AJOL was re-launched and expanded. Through INASP, AJOL formed a partnership with the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) relating to the open source software that underpins AJOL's online services. Following the proven need for the AJOL model in developing countries, INASP is currently establishing similar fledgling "JOL"s in Bangladesh, Vietnam and Nepal.

Partner organisations

Donor partners

AJOL is currently supported by the Ford Foundation and through INASP's Programme for the Enhancement of Research Information, by the Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (RDMFA), Sida, the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad).

African Journals Online participates in the WorldWideScience global science gateway.

Hosted journals

Active journals

Some of the journals hosted by AJOL are:

Discontinued journals

AJOL also hosts the archives of several discontinued journals:

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peer review</span> Evaluation of work by one or more people of similar competence to the producers of the work

Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work. It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review methods are used to maintain quality standards, improve performance, and provide credibility. In academia, scholarly peer review is often used to determine an academic paper's suitability for publication. Peer review can be categorized by the type of activity and by the field or profession in which the activity occurs, e.g., medical peer review. It can also be used as a teaching tool to help students improve writing assignments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scientific journal</span> Periodical journal publishing scientific research

In academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication intended to further the progress of science, usually by sharing findings from research with readers. They are normally specialized based on discipline, with authors picking which one they send their manuscripts to.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Academic publishing</span> Subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship

Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Academic journal</span> Peer-reviewed scholarly periodical

An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and discussion of research. They nearly universally require peer review or other scrutiny from contemporaries competent and established in their respective fields. Content typically takes the form of articles presenting original research, review articles, or book reviews. The purpose of an academic journal, according to Henry Oldenburg, is to give researchers a venue to "impart their knowledge to one another, and contribute what they can to the Grand design of improving natural knowledge, and perfecting all Philosophical Arts, and Sciences."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access</span> Research publications distributed freely online

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. Under some models of open access publishing, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.

BioMed Central (BMC) is a United Kingdom-based, for-profit scientific open access publisher that produces over 250 scientific journals. All its journals are published online only. BioMed Central describes itself as the first and largest open access science publisher. It was founded in 2000 and has been owned by Springer, now Springer Nature, since 2008.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open educational resources</span> Open learning resource

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under some licenses. These are designed to reduce accessibility barriers by implementing best practices in teaching and to be adapted for local unique contexts.

INASP is an international development charity working with a global network of partners to improve access, production and use of research information and knowledge, so that countries are equipped to solve their development challenges.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electronic Information for Libraries</span> Nonprofit organization founded in 1999

Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL) works with libraries worldwide to enable access to digital information for people in developing and transition countries. They are an international not-for-profit organisation based in Vilnius with a global network of partners.

<i>PLOS One</i> Peer-reviewed open-access scientific journal

PLOS One is a peer-reviewed open access mega journal published by the Public Library of Science (PLOS) since 2006. The journal covers primary research from any discipline within science and medicine. The Public Library of Science began in 2000 with an online petition initiative by Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus, formerly director of the National Institutes of Health and at that time director of Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center; Patrick O. Brown, a biochemist at Stanford University; and Michael Eisen, a computational biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Public Knowledge Project</span> Metadata reservation project for e-journals

The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is a non-profit research initiative that is focused on the importance of making the results of publicly funded research freely available through open access policies, and on developing strategies for making this possible including software solutions. It is a partnership between the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia, the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University, the University of Pittsburgh, Ontario Council of University Libraries, the California Digital Library and the School of Education at Stanford University. It seeks to improve the scholarly and public quality of academic research through the development of innovative online environments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Journal Systems</span> Journal management and publishing system

Open Journal Systems, also known as OJS, is an open source and free software for the management of peer-reviewed academic journals, created by the Public Knowledge Project, and released under the GNU General Public License.

Scholarly communication involves the creation, publication, dissemination and discovery of academic research, primarily in peer-reviewed journals and books. It is “the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use." This primarily involves the publication of peer-reviewed academic journals, books and conference papers.

AuthorAID is the name given to a number of initiatives that provide support to researchers from developing countries in preparing academic articles for publication in peer-reviewed journals. Phyllis Freeman and Anthony Robbins, co-editors of the Journal of Public Health Policy (JPHP), first suggested the name and concept in 2004 and published "Closing the ‘publishing gap’ between rich and poor" about AuthorAID on the Science and Development Network (SciDev.Net), in 2005.

The European Distance and E-Learning Network (EDEN), originally named the European Distance Education Network - established in 1991, is an international educational association open to institutions and individuals dealing with e-learning, open education, and distance education. EDEN is a not-for-profit organisation, registered as a limited company under English law.

Academic journal publishing reform is the advocacy for changes in the way academic journals are created and distributed in the age of the Internet and the advent of electronic publishing. Since the rise of the Internet, people have organized campaigns to change the relationships among and between academic authors, their traditional distributors and their readership. Most of the discussion has centered on taking advantage of benefits offered by the Internet's capacity for widespread distribution of reading material.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Predatory publishing</span> Fraudulent business model for scientific publications

Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors only superficially checking articles for quality and legitimacy, and without providing editorial and publishing services that legitimate academic journals provide, whether open access or not. Namely, the rejection rate of predatory journals is low, but seldom is zero. The phenomenon of "open access predatory publishers" was first noticed by Jeffrey Beall, when he described "publishers that are ready to publish any article for payment". However, criticisms about the label "predatory" have been raised. A lengthy review of the controversy started by Beall appears in The Journal of Academic Librarianship.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeffrey Beall</span> American librarian

Jeffrey Beall is an American librarian and library scientist, who drew attention to "predatory open access publishing", a term he coined, and created Beall's list, a list of potentially predatory open-access publishers. He is a critic of the open access publishing movement and particularly how predatory publishers use the open access concept, and is known for his blog Scholarly Open Access. He has also written on this topic in The Charleston Advisor, in Nature, in Learned Publishing, and elsewhere.

An open-access monograph is a scholarly monograph which is made openly available online with open license.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access in Denmark</span> Overview of the culture and regulation of open access in Denmark

Open access to scholarly communication in Denmark has grown rapidly since the 1990s. As in other countries in general, open access publishing is less expensive than traditional, paper-based, pre-Internet publishing.

References

  1. UN 2006 triennial review
  2. Teferra, D. and Altbach, C. "African Higher Education: Challenges for the 21st Century" Higher Education 47 (January, 2004), pp.21-50
  3. Arunachalam, S. (2003). "Information for Research in Developing Countries - Information Technology, a Friend or Foe?" (PDF). The International Information and Library Review. 35 (2–4): 133–147. doi:10.1016/S1057-2317(03)00032-8. hdl: 10150/105322 .
  4. Smart, P.; Pearce, C.; Tonukari, N.J. (2004). "E-Publishing in Developing Economies". Canadian Journal of Communication . 29 (3): 329–342. doi: 10.22230/cjc.2004v29n3a1424 .
  5. Rosenberg, Diana (2002). "African Journals Online: improving awareness and access". Learned Publishing. 15 (1): 51–57. doi: 10.1087/095315102753303689 .
  6. "African Journals Online. Welcome to AJOL!". ajol.info. African Journals Online (RF) S.A. Non Profit Company (NPC). 2023. Retrieved 9 February 2023.

Further reading