Contribute to covering the fees for AfricArXiv preprint hosting on the Open Science Framework (OSF).
Open Science Framework Preprint Services: Advancing Science, Driving Impact, Opening Access, and Saving Money
Preprints, sometimes referred to as “working papers,” are scholarly manuscripts made freely available to scholars and the public prior to publication. Preprint servers are free, open source, community-led collaborations that allow researchers from across academic disciplines to post and search through working papers, unpublished work, conference materials, and articles under review.
Preprints offer the following advantages in the dissemination of scholarly research:
- Greater visibility and faster impact of scholarship
- Broader and faster feedback to authors from subject-matter experts
- Permanent DOI, making scholarship more discoverable and more durable
- Makes work truly open-access
- Meets funder and government open access policy requirements
Preprints are an essential part of the future of scholarly infrastructure, and as a community of scholars we are seeking your support to fund this crucial, efficient infrastructure.
Who we are
We are a cross-disciplinary coalition of academic scholars from across the globe partnering with the non-profit Center for Open Science (COS) to provide open access to academic scholarship through disciplinary preprint servers that host cutting edge, open access scholarship. We partner with COS through OSF Preprints, a service which runs on the Open Science Framework.
Number of Communities: 7
Total Number of preprints in 2022: 24,438
Total Number of Unique Pageviews: 8.7M+
Total Number of preprints since 2016: 118,746
Value Proposition of Preprints
Preprints provide a viable and affordableopen-access option for researchers and their institutions. Preprint costs are only a fraction of more expensive subscription-based academic journal collections.
Publisher | APC costs (per paper) Elsevier | up to $9,900 Wiley | up to $6,100 Springer|Nature | up to $11,690 OSF Preprints | $10* (no charge to authors)
These substantial cost savings demonstrate that investment in OSF Preprints may be a more affordable alternative to the status-quo APC model. This is supported by the growing number of preprint submissions coming from institutional researchers, reflected below:
Institution | Number of preprints | Potential APC cost savings Princeton University | 499 | $811,374 University of Oxford | 382 | $621,132 Massachusetts Institute of Technology | 360 | $585,360 Universiteit Gent | 338 | $549,588 Duke University | 335 | $544,710 New York University | 318 | $517,068 University of Virginia | 310 | $504,060 UCLA | 151 | $245,526
For a Fraction of Your Current Subscription Costs, You Can Sustain the Future of Open Access
Preprints are a powerful form of open-access scholarship and are a key component of an open and transparent research lifecycle. They are also an exceptional value: we are currently able to provide these services for free to both researchers and readers. We predict that over the next 10 years, the annual hosting costs for our preprint servers will be $250,000 per year; $2.5 million over the next decade. We would love to meet with you and your colleagues to discuss how your institution can support our coalition with an investment towards defraying those costs and building a vital part of the future infrastructure for open science.
OSF and AfricArXiv
Since our launch in 2018, we are partnering with the Center for Open Science (COS) to enhance the discoverability of African research output. The COS maintains the Open Science Framework (OSF) to help researchers conduct research more rigorously, and manage and share their work more openly.
AfricArXiv manages a customized instance on the OSF with more than 400 accepted preprint manuscripts, presentation slide decks, and posters by African researchers and on Africa-focused research topics.
For customized preprint infrastructural services, the COS has developed a distributed cost model explained at https://www.cos.io/products/osf-preprints which is based on the yearly submission rate:
Please note: Complementing the above infrastructural services by the COS, the AfricArXiv team is providing regular services that include:
monthly partner conversations with COS
submission moderation
quality assurance
research dissemination
Our AfricArXiv OSF Budget for 2022/2023
920.00 € | OSF 2022 fee* (US$ 999) 280.00 € | + 30% of the above fee towards AfricArXiv for reinvestments in our roadmap 300.00 € | Campaign management 1,500.00 €
_____ * rounded from a currency exchange rate of 1.00 EUR to 1.09 USD as of June 2023
