AfricArXiv content is CC BY 4.0 licensed.
AfricArXiv is a free, open source and community-led digital archive for African research. We provide a non-profit platform for African scietists to upload their working papers, pre-prints, accepted manuscripts (post-prints), and published papers. We also provide options to link data and code, and for article versioning. AfricArXiv is dedicated to speeding and opening up research and collaboration among African scientists and helping to build the future of scholarly communication.
Twitter: twitter.com/africarxiv
e-mail us if you would like to be involved: contribute@africarxiv.org
‘A preprint is a complete manuscript shared with a public audience without peer review. Often, preprints are also submitted for peer review and publication in a traditional scholarly journal. Preprints uploaded to OSF Preprints or a community preprint server accelerate scholarly communication and public access.’
African research output should be owned and hosted on African territory. We therefore propose here an African repository for preprint uploads as well as the aggregation of African research output including:
The portal will be hosted by African research institutions in each of the 5 regions on the continent. To achieve this we will build a decentralized infrastructure with the following features:
| preprint repository | hub and search portal |
|---|---|
| as described here | …/AfricArxiv/hub-and-search-portal |
| upload of preprint manuscripts, student reports, research proposals, registered reports/preregistrations, short communications, etc. | aggregating scholarly output from and about Africa via one interface inlc preprints form toher platforms, scholarly books, datasets for streamlined discoverability |
| based on PKP OPS (?) | via API of partner platforms |
| DOI and CC-BY 4.0 attribution | … |
| integration with Crossref, ORCID, … | … |
We propose the same approach of establishing a decentralized, Africa-owned data management infrastructure and are seeking collaboration with:
login (via email / affiliation / ORCID / Github / …)
document upload
document versioning with time stamp and archiving of all versions under one doi
licensing (CC-BY 4.0 and others to choose from incl. all commonly used academic licenses, i.e. MIT, GNU, CC-BY-…, …)
Indexing via Google Scholar, OpenAIR, PubMed, …
entry mask to add authors, affiliations, tags, keywords, title, abstract, lay summary
interoperability with other existing repositories
Discipline (categories) and keywords search
we are aware of techniological progress made on the blockchain in scholarly communication ans processing. Below are a few examples of blockchain features and service providers that we will investigate for collaboration and implementartion in the foreseeable future.
Adding blockchain components e.g. for publishing steps to ensure an affordable, efficient, decentralized infrastructure