African Journals OnLine, South Africa
African Journals OnLine’s mandate is to increase visibility of and access to African research output and to support African scholarly publishing.
This mandate relates to two main groups of beneficiaries:
a) African scholarly journal publishers, and
b) African and international researchers needing to access scholarly publications.
The internet is a major underutilised gateway for improving access to African information and allowing increased awareness and usage of African-originated research findings both within and outside of Africa. Many academics publishing from Africa do not have the resources to adequately publish and distribute their research online in isolation. AJOL is not a publisher, rather participation in AJOL allows publishers and editors to include (or manage) the online publication of their journals on a central and internationally accessible system. 271 journals from throughout Africa are currently participating, and even if a journal moves away from Africa, or ceases publication, AJOL retains the right to continue preserving and hosting that journal’s back issues published during participation with AJOL. The AJOL website receives around 50 000 visits per month.
AJOL digitizes, stores and then provides free online hosting of journal homepages, tables of contents of the issues and abstracts of each article. Relating to the second group of beneficiaries, AJOL offers global access to the research output of Africa on a platform comparable to the well-resourced Western equivalents. For researchers who need access to a large range of journals’ contents and abstracts or to specific articles (as opposed to a full subscription to a given journal), AJOL provides some extremely useful tools. Important amongst these is an article delivery service for researchers to access full text of individual journal articles.
Digital versions of full text are received from publishers or scanned from hard copy and stored on AJOL’s local and overseas servers. The articles are currently delivered as a PDF file via email to the person who places the article order. The income from these individual article deliveries (less AJOL costs) is then annually sent on to the originating journals once the total accrued is above a threshold amount. The AJOL article delivery service pricing is progressively subsidized and relates to the income level category of the country in which the institution or individual researcher is based.
Journals still need to be contacted directly for full subscriptions or permission to use their content, as copyright is held by the journals.
View the website for African Journals OnLine