AfricArXiv is constantly looking for the most relevant online infrastructure to adapt and live up to the requirements and expectations of the African scholarly community. 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.
The AfricArXiv team is looking forward to continuing our work along the following categories in collaboration with our network partner organizations in Africa and other world regions:
Financial sustainability
Reach a sustainable financial structure with the trust of the African scholarly community
Partnering with funders and investors across Africa and around the world
Expanding our digital infrastructure
Current partner repositories: Open Science Framework (OSF), Pubpub, ScienceOpen, Zenodo, Qeios, Figshare
Adding open-source and self-hosted repositories: PKP/OPS, HAL, InvenioRDM, …
Interoperability of the digital scholarly infrastructure we create
Building integrations with ORCID, DataCite, CrossRef, ROR
Meeting the highest quality standards for research integrity
Quality control via submission moderation
Facilitating Open Peer Review through selected community-driven services and campaigns: PREreview, Peer Community in … (PCI), Qeios, ScienceOpen, ASAPbio, …
Increasing networking and partnership building in the growing African Open Science Landscape
Liaising and strengthening partnerships with African grassroots and institutional partners such as the African Open Science Platform (AOSP), AfricaOSH, regional RENs (WACREN, ASREN, UbuntuNet Alliance), EARMA, SARIMA, AfLIA, and LIBSENSE
Establishing Institutional partnerships with
African scholarly libraries and African universities and other Higher Education organizations
African studies departments, libraries, and associations outside of Africa
Research-related institutions, organizations, funders, and companies in Africa or elsewhere
Establishing AfricArXiv as a self-hosted Africa-based Open Access platform
Strategic implementation of our partnerships with the Center for Open Science, ScienceOpen, ORCID, Open Knowledge Maps, Code for Africa, Knowledge Futures Group, International African Institute (IAI), Open African Repository (OAR)
Knowledge exchange, collaboration and scholarly networking between scholars in Africa and other world regions
With our partners Bobab, AfricaOSH, African Science Initiative (ASI), WACREN/LIBSENSE, Just One Giant Lab (JOGL), Psychological Science Accelerator, Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education (IGDORE), eLearning Africa, Vilsquare Makers’ Hub
Fostering Science Literacy across the continent
In collaboration with TCC Africa, African Science Literacy Network (ASLN), Under the Microscope, AfroScience Network, Science Communication Hub Nigeria (SciComNigeria), Pint Of Science Kenya
Building capacity in Open Science practices and Open Access scholarly publishing
Providing training, workshops, consultancy services, lectures, scientific writing-sprints, calls for submissions, student assignments and other educative formats on OA scholarly publishing and Peer Review in collaboration with our partner organizations TCC Africa, Vilsquare, r0g_agency for open culture and critical transformation, Open Science MOOC, AuthorAid, Science For Africa, Access 2 Perspectives
Develop a self-hosted chatbot for community support and Q&A
Fostering [African] language diversity in scholarly communication
Encouraging submissions of scholarly works in traditional and official African languages
Providing guidelines and information for multilingualism in science in African languages
Encouraging collaboration between Indigenous Peoples and researchers
Highlighting the importance of indigenous knowledge in all disciplines
Legal aspects: assurance of self-determination, Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) and compliance with UNDRIP
Providing guidelines and information on the inclusion of indigenous peoples in research project design, planning and implementation
Fostering gender equity in academia
Balancing gender equity across all scholarly disciplines
Encouraging scholarly work on gender-related topics across disciplines
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0)
