In the global scientific landscape, African researchers and research institutions face significant challenges and barriers to visibility and recognition of their work. To a large extent, this is due to the limited digital capacity of most African research institutions to adopt digital services, features, and integrations with state-of-the-art research publishing and dissemination practices. AfricArXiv, the African research registry, is designed as a vital platform to address this issue, providing an inclusive and comprehensive avenue to disseminate African research output by adopting best practices for digital scholarly archiving through persistent identifiers, comprehensive metadata curation, and by connecting uploaded items to related research items listed in other repositories and journals.
Through our work with AfricArXiv, we aim to provide affordable solutions to enhance digital research discoverability and interoperability across systems and services.
Individual researchers can use AfricArXiv to archive their work (manuscripts, datasets, presentations, books, book chapters, proposals, policy papers, etc.) making them citable and discoverable through DOI assignments.
Universities and research institutions can work with AfricArXiv through 1) repository mirroring for increased visibility and accessibility; 2) repository migration to transfer the existing institutional repository to the AfricArXiv platform, benefiting from advanced archiving features and broader visibility; or 3) for institutions that do not have an existing digital repository to set one up within AfricArXiv to manage and share their research outputs effectively.
Promoting and fostering solutions for diamond open-access publishing, AfricArXiv also serves for the hosting of journals, implementing the overlay journal model. We provide technical support, editorial guidance, and training resources to editorial teams to enable them to operate efficiently and effectively within our repository ecosystem.
With these services and by providing features like persistent identifiers and ensuring comprehensive and standardized metadata curation we hope to make a significant contribution to the enhancement of African research visibility on a global scale.