AfricArXiv - the African preprint repository

Collective

Fiscal Host: Access2Perspectives Host

AfricArxiv is a community-led digital archive for African research communication. We provide a non-profit platform to upload working papers, preprints, accepted manuscripts (post-prints), presentations, data sets to any of our partner services.

AfricArXiv - the African preprint repository

Thanks to your financial contributions, we are operating on an estimated annual budget of €267

Today's Balance

€267.46

Become a contributor

Financial contributions

Custom contribution

Donation

Make a custom one time or recurring contribution to support this collective.

One time contribution

Author contribution

Voluntary contribution by authors per submission towards the maintenance of our services. Read more

Starts at

€3 EUR

1 organization has contributed

Goal

PKP OPS installation and testing

€300 EUR goal

€0.00 EUR raised (0%)

Help us unpack, install, customize and test the PKP OPS package. Read more

Starts at

€3 EUR

Goal

African Science Literacy in Nigeria

€3,000 EUR goal

€0.00 EUR raised (0%)

African Science Literacy Network and AfricArXiv are collaborating on the translation of selected ... Read more

Starts at

€3 EUR

Goal

Web hosting 2018 & 2019

€125 EUR goal

€9.50 EUR raised (8%)

Help us balance the expenses for our web domain www.africarxiv.org for the years 2018 and 2019. Read more

Starts at

€3 EUR

1 individual has contributed

One time contribution

COVID19 Africa Response

Collecting and providing resources, ideas, and guidelines around the COVID19 pandemic in Africa ... Read more

€10 EUR

Goal

Community Engagement

€300 EUR / month goal

€0.00 EUR / month raised (0%)

AfricArXiv community engagement covers activities such as social media management, organizing web... Read more

Starts at

€3 EUR / month

Recurring contribution

backer

Support us with a monthly contribution to sustain our daily work incl. communication and outreach... Read more

Starts at

€3 EUR / month

Goal

ORCID membership for AfricArXiv

€1,200 EUR / year goal

€0.00 EUR / year raised (0%)

Help us become an ORCID member organization with full integration. Read more

Starts at

€3 EUR / year

Goal

OSF hosting 2020

€920 EUR goal

€132.40 EUR raised (14%)

Covering expenses for AfricArXiv's preprint hosting on the OSF infrastructure (USD 999.- in 2020). Read more

Starts at

€3 EUR

2 individuals have contributed

Recurring contribution

sponsor

Become a sponsor for the dissemination of Open Access preprints in Africa. Read more

Starts at

€150 EUR / year

Events

Past event

TCC Africa online training webinars

Aug 19, 2020

Past event

AfricaOSH summit 2020

May 14 → May 16, 2020

07:00

AfricArXiv will be hosting the Open Access track at this year's Africa Open Science Hardware summ...Read more

Past event

COVID-19 Africa Response

Mar 23 → Jul 14, 2020

06:00

Top financial contributors

Individuals

Rickard Carlsson

€100 EUR since Feb 2020

Incognito

€50 EUR since Feb 2020

Jens Bemme

€10 EUR since Feb 2020

Organizations

University of Bern

€142 EUR since Mar 2020

What's new with AfricArXiv - the African preprint repository

Stay up to dates with our latest activities and progress.

Quick recap: how it all began

We launched AfricArXiv in June 2018 envisioning a pan-African preprint repository with several goals in mind:

Published on February 20, 2020 by Access2Perspectives Host

Conversations

Let’s get the ball rolling! This is where things get planned and sometimes this is where things get done. Ask questions, thank people for their efforts, and contribute your skills to the service of the community.

Budget

See how money openly circulates through AfricArXiv - the African preprint repository. All contributions and all expenses are published in our transparent public ledger. Learn who is donating, how much, where is that money going, submit expenses, get reimbursed and more!

Financial contribution to AfricArXiv - the African prepri...

University of Bern | 3/2/2020 | View Details

+€142.00EUR

Financial contribution to AfricArXiv - the African prepri...

Jens Bemme | 2/27/2020 | View Details

+€10.00EUR

Financial contribution to AfricArXiv - the African prepri...

Incognito | 2/16/2020 | View Details

+€50.00EUR

Today’s balance

€267.46 EUR

Estimated annual budget

~ €267.46 EUR

AfricArXiv - the African preprint repository is all of us

Our contributors 7

Everyone who has supported AfricArXiv - the African preprint repository. Individuals and organizations that believe in –and take ownership of– our purpose.

Osman Aldirdiri

Collective Admin

AfricArXiv Strategy Manager

Johanssen Obanda

Collective Admin

Contribute to the AfricArXiv preprint repository and the people behind the scenes.

In order to sustain the AfricArXiv services, maintain and grow the community and platform, we provide individuals as well as institutions with the following means to financially contribute to our work.
Our expenses include:

building and maintaining the AfricArXiv platform
community engagement
marketing
service fees (web hosting and other service partnerships e.g. with ORCID, OSF, …)
traveling and presenting at conferences – incl. related expenses for Visa and accommodation
partnership building
…

All financial contributions we receive will be spent to one or more of the above-mentioned purposes. To discuss what exactly your given amount shall contribute to please contact us at [email protected].

Please note: We are not (yet) registered as an institution but work remotely as a team with no dedicated office space. Therefore, we currently cannot issue donation receipts.

Contributors, challenges and opportunities

Since our launch, we have invested our personal resources (time and money) for building the platform, including our website and outreach to the target audiences. We think that researchers should not be the ones paying for our services and instead, we are reaching out to institutional libraries, governments, foundations, and donors – both African and international. For crowdfunding, we have set up a contribution page at info.africarxiv.org/contribute/ and are developing a financing strategy and roadmap for 2020 and years to come.

Due to the complex situation on the continent, we have first looked into learning about the stakeholders and had discussions with various experts. We want to partner with African stakeholders primarily and complement financial contributions internationally. In March 2020, we aim to launch our crowdfunding campaign and expect steady uptake of contributions so that we will be able to cover our ongoing expenses including the OSF fee for 2020.

Funds are limited especially in Africa and globally tied to outdated structures. As scholarly communication shifts towards more transparency and Open Science practices on a global level we are aiming for a strong and unified voice from Africa to realign funding structures – e.g. via IOI – investinopen.org.

Challenges in covering expenses

Marketing is a lot of work and involves a lot of money for travels and many hours invested to ensure that the Research stakeholders learn about the benefits preprint repositories provide to the research community. That is not only the case in Africa, Latin America, and Asia but globally. Other challenges in the region include funding constraints, low salaries for HE staff and infrastructure deficits. Most of the community leads work voluntarily on the preprint repositories and have only limited resources to do the work necessary for fundraising, which in itself and elsewhere is a full-time job for much bigger teams.

Our sustainability strategy so far

Additionally to our ongoing partnership with the Center for Open Science to use their OSF preprints infrastructure, we have diversified our platform by partnering as well with Zenodo and ScienceOpen. This allows African researchers to choose the preprint repository of their preference and based on their requirements:

Thereby, we will continue working on ensuring our preprint services remain available for the African Research community.

The specific and additional services and benefits provided by each platform are listed in africarxiv.org/submit/.
In Zenodo, we use a community account that is free of charge to set up and maintain by anyone around any topic.
With ScienceOpen we have an agreement that we can use their preprint infrastructure for free in 2020 and reassess towards the end of the year. On top of the submission portal, the preprint system at ScienceOpen has a standardized peer review integrated which adds another service level.
OSF provides for data storage of the whole research cycle of a project. It is up to the scientists to choose which platform they prefer.

On the onset of AfricArXiv’s operations, our long term vision was always to create a platform that is hosted on the African continent, decentrally at various research institutions in every region, to ensure ownership of the African research output and empower African research stakeholders in engagement, collaboration, and exchange of knowledge on a global level.

We are reaching out to other initiatives, organizations, and partners to make this a reality soon. Contact us to be involved. Are you interested to work with us for Open Access and Research in Africa?
Email us: [email protected]