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:

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.

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Funds are limited especially in Africa and globally tied to outdated structures.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. 

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. 

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.