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African Journals OnLine (AJOL): the journey towards African learning translating into African development

Susan Murray, AJOL 

Academic publications from the developed global North do not adequately reflect the research needs and priorities of African countries and are not always relevant or appropriate for higher education in Africa. At the same time as online academic resources from overseas are made available in Africa (through initiatives like HINARI, AGORA and OARE), there needs to be corresponding online worldwide access to information from Africa. Africa needs access to its own scholarly publications, and must also contribute to the international academic community. 

Primarily due to difficulties accessing them, African-published research papers have been under-utilised, under-valued and under-cited in the international and African research arenas. Many hundreds of worthy peer-reviewed scholarly journals publishing from Africa lack the means to disseminate their research widely, not least as a result of resource limitations and the digital divide. 

AJOL is a non-profit organisation whose mandate is to promote and increase online access to African research output and to support African scholarly publishing. This is done primarily via the provision of a central and globally available online platform, using amended open-source software, through which African journals and full-text articles can be accessed. AJOL hosts over 300 journals covering a wide range of academic disciplines and published from 24 African countries. AJOL allows for free access to more than 30 000 article abstracts. AJOL supports both open access and subscription-based journals and is growing continuously. 

This paper details the achievements, challenges, current model and lessons learned by AJOL in a decade of striving to serve the African research, academic, library and scholarly publishing communities.

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