Over the past 5 years, we have worked with the affiliate repositories OSF, Zenodo, Figshare, Pubpub, and ScienceOpen, and certain aspects of our work also with Qeios. Regarding costs, at this point, we have no plans to charge for individual submissions of preprints. Various costs apply in research dissemination and archiving, which is under global debate on how to get settled in a variety of systems and regional settings. For AfricArXiv, we are both leading and participating in these discussions, accordingly - for the African region and on a global scale.
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
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
Increasing networking and partnership building in the growing African Open Science Landscape
Liaising and strengthening partnerships with African grassroots and institutional partners
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
Continuously and steadily increase the discoverability of African research
Knowledge exchange, collaboration, and scholarly networking between scholars in Africa and other world regions
Fostering Science Literacy across the continent
Building capacity in Open Science practices and Open Access scholarly publishing
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
