AfricArXiv - the pan-African Open Access portal

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As signatories to the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (sfDORA), the C19 Rapid Peer Review initiative and the African Open Access Principles in Scholarly Communication we foster language diversity, research integrity and transparency in African scholarly publishing.

The vision and mission of AfricArXiv include fostering community among African researchers, facilitate collaborations between African and non-African researchers, and raise the profile of African research on the international stage. 

We are making African research visible globally, thereby increasing collaboration across the continent as well as triggering interdisciplinary research. This is achieved by partnering with established and renowned organisations inside and outside Africa that specialize in science communication, capacity building, scholarly tech development and networking – all of which serve the discoverability of African research results and achievements as well as the reputation building of African researchers’ profiles. 

Through the building of an open, transparent, reliable, efficient and decentralized discoverability infrastructure, it is our aim to support the connectivity of African scholars – and African scholarship – to a wider audience.  As part of the near future plans, we intend to further diversify tools and applications to work along innovative, globally applicable standards and methodologies to accomplish our mission to ensure African ownership of African data. In the next three years, we want to further increase networking and partnership building in the growing African Open Science ecosystem and establish AfricArXiv as a self-hosted, cross-continental decentralised Open Access platform. We envision the various scholarly repositories that host African content to become interoperable and work with various stakeholders towards that goal. The full roadmap can be found on africarxiv.org/roadmap.

Building and managing AfricArXiv involves expenses for human resources, technology development, partner services, third-party services like web hosting, digital communication tool fees etc. From 2018 to 2020, these expenses were covered by direct financial contributions mostly by the core team members, conference participation and partner service fee waivers and a highly dedicated in-kind workforce by the wider AfricArxiv team and users. 

Our planned revenue streams include institutional partnerships, crowdfunding, training, consultancy services and capacity building
Financial contributions to AfricArXiv can be made via PayPal, mPesa, direct debit, and online transfer. For details, see https://info.africarxiv.org/contribute/. 

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:

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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.