Electronic Journal Publishing: A Reader
Version 2.0
Published by INASP, 2001
©INASP 2001
http://www.inasp.info
7.1 African Journals
Online: giving journals published in Africa a presence on the Web
Diana Rosenberg
That
academic journal publishing in Africa is and has been for a number of years
in crisis, is something of an understatement. Many once renowned periodicals
and journals have ceased publication or been reduced in frequency and size.
Publication schedules are rarely maintained. It is not unknown for journals to
remain dormant for years. New journals rarely live beyond the first year. Those
that do continue are usually reliant on donor subsidies. As publishing outlets
in Africa have dwindled, so has research suffered. The means to publish
research are lacking and the results on which to develop future research are
not disseminated. Yet indigenous publication is essential to the emergence of
the African academic enterprise. It cannot be replaced by publication in the
West. The marginalization and underrepresentation of
African scholarship within both the field of African studies and the production
of knowledge generally are some of the effects.
One of the
key problems is that African-published journals lack visibility. The journals
that do exist are not known about and are therefore not used. Few, if any,
African-published journals have a viable subscription base and therefore lack
long term sustainability. Not many are indexed in international indexing and
abstracting databases. One way to overcome this particular problem is to
improve awareness and accessibility through more effective marketing and
promotion.
The Internet
has now established itself as an important means of promoting journals. It may
be exploited in various ways for distributing information about a journal, for
example through electronic discussion and Usenet groups, through a journal's
own website, through tables of contents (TOCs)
services, or through access to electronic text versions. For African journals,
it can generate a much-needed visibility and may enable them to reach much
wider audiences. Yet, because of weak technological infrastructures and the
additional costs of using the new technologies, few African journal publishers
are able to make use of this new marketing tool. This situation was highlighted
during the 1996 ICSU Press/UNESCO Expert Conference on Electronic Publishing in
Science.
It was for
these reasons that the International Network for the Availability of Scientific
Publications (INASP), after consultations with colleagues in Africa,
established African Journals Online (AJOL), a pilot project offering access via
the Internet to either the tables of contents or the full text of
African-published journals.
Objectives
AJOL has as
its objectives:
to enable
the results of research carried out in Africa to become more widely known and
more easily accessible;
to
strengthen the African academic publishing sector, by providing income both
through encouraging print or electronic subscriptions and through the purchase
of single articles;
to assess
the impact of using the Internet to promote African-published journals.
Coverage
The pilot
project was restricted to journals in science, technology and medicine, in the
English language, published in Sub-Saharan Africa, excluding South Africa. (The
H-Nets H-Africa tables of contents service http://web.archive.org/web/19990101000000-20050201235959/http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~africa/toc/index.html
provides access to around 100 Africana journals, including ones published in
Africa. So the humanities, to a certain extent, are already covered.) Journals
were selected on the basis of their past history of content quality and regular
publication and so that as many different subject areas and different countries
of publication as possible could be included. Initially ten journals were
selected in science and technology and three in medicine. Subsequently, when
further funding became available, it proved possible to expand the coverage
with a further seven journals in science and technology. The AJOL service is
offered in two parts, with TOCs of science and technology
journals available on the INASP website and full text of medical journals on
the Bioline site, an existing electronic publishing
service for bio-scientists. Issues for 1997 and 1998 were included in the pilot
project.
The
situation at April 1999 is as follows:
TOCs of the following journals are now available at the
INASP website: http://www.inasp.info/ajol/ :
The
following journals have been invited to join the TOC service but no issues have
yet been received:
TOCs, abstracts and full text of the following medical
journals are available at the Bioline site: http://www.bdt.org.br/bioline/
TOC service
Journal
publishers were invited to join the project (or, increasingly, request to join
the project). Once agreement had been reached (for example on supply of
evaluation information and resolution of copyright issues concerning supply of
photocopies), INASP took out a subscription for the 1997 and 1998 volumes.
When the
first issue of a journal arrives, the table of contents is placed on the
website. In addition, separate pages are provided for information about the
journal (mission statement, editorial board, etc.) and how to order a
subscription and its costs. For subsequent issues, it is only necessary to place
the new TOC on the site. The information provided is presented in exactly the
same format that is found in the journal. The user moves from the AJOL home
page http://web.archive.org/web/19990101000000-20050201235959/http://www.inasp.info/ajol/index.html
, to the journal information http://web.archive.org/web/19990101000000-20050201235959/http://www.inasp.info/ajol/journals/sinet/index.html
, to the contents of an individual issue http://web.archive.org/web/19990101000000-20050201235959/http://www.inasp.info/ajol/journals/sinet/vol21no2.html
. When a new journal is added to the service, this is highlighted. Links are
provided to other sites on the Internet which display TOCs
of or indexes to African-published journals http://web.archive.org/web/19990101000000-20050201235959/http://www.inasp.info/ajol/links.html
.
Technical
work is carried out externally by INASP's Web master.
Site design and maintenance is her responsibility. Text is prepared by INASP
and sent by e-mail attachment in RTF format. This was found to be more economic
than training someone in-house.
Access to
the TOCs is free. Users are given the option of
ordering a photocopy of any article listed. Payment is by article; order
instructions, together with a form, are supplied. (�10 buys two articles
and, after that, the charge is �5 per article. These prices are in line
with those of other document supply services and aim to cover costs and
generate a small surplus to be returned to the journal.) Orders can be sent by
post, fax or e-mail, and articles can be sent by post or fax. The document
supply service is chiefly aimed at users outside of Africa. Within Africa, the
African Journals Distribution Programme already supports the supply of
African-published journals to university libraries and all TOCs
come from journals within that programme.
Full text
service
The
Electronic Publishing Trust for Development (EPT) has been established to
enable scientific communities in developing countries to take advantage of new
communication technologies to disseminate the results of their work
internationally. In particular it aims to make scientific journals produced in
developing countries available online using the Internet. Collaboration between
INASP and EPT has resulted in the text of the three medical journals being
available on the Bioline site. A further six journals
from Africa are also available on this site.
Tables of
contents, abstracts and full text/graphics are offered. Access to TOCs and abstracts is free of charge. Users can take out an
electronic subscription to the journal or pay to see the full text of
individual articles. Prices are those supplied by the publisher and all income
is returned to the publishers.
Implementation
After
receiving initial funding for the pilot project from UNESCO, implementation
began in October 1997. The service went live on the Internet in April/May 1998.
Costs to date for running the pilot project (including journal subscriptions
for 2 years, contribution to EPT, purchase of equipment, communications, staff
time, overheads) are in the region of US$ 24,000. UNESCO has contributed US$
14,500 and the National Academy of Sciences (USA) US$ 7,000.
Publicity
Publicizing
the project in every possible way has been seen as crucial. If the new service
was not known about and used, then it would not succeed in making African
research more visible and accessible. Both print and electronic means were
utilized:
leaflet
The basis of
the print publicity was a simple 3-fold A4 leaflet, on blue paper, 3,000 of
which were initially printed. When these were exhausted, a further 3,500 were
printed; this latest version included the new journals added to the programme.
Most have now been distributed.
The leaflets
were inserted in the May 1988 issue of the INASP Newsletter (circulation
of 950) and have been distributed at various meetings: Zimbabwe International
Book Fair, African Studies Association in Chicago, UNESCO and AAAS/ICSU
meetings in Paris, and the Lund Conference on the Electronic Library are some
examples.
In addition
the leaflet was sent to major African studies journals; major
library/information/book journals and newsletters with Africa coverage; major
science journals in the areas covered by AJOL; and journals included in AJOL. A
cover letter was included requesting publicity in the journal. Many have
carried news items in their journals or provided a link from their journal's
web page. Key Africana libraries, major international donor agencies with an
interest or presence in Africa and African Studies scholars in the sciences
were also sent the leaflet, with a cover letter bringing the service to their
attention.
newsletter
article
An article
about AJOL appeared in the May issue of INASP Newsletter.
advertisement
The text of
an advertisement was prepared and sent to those journals offering to run it. It
has already appeared in a number of journals.
listservs and links
A release
about AJOL has been carried by ten listservs. Major
Africana sites have been asked to provide links to AJOL; most have agreed.
search
engines
Details of
AJOL were sent to major search engines.
electronic
journals and newsletters
Electronic
journals (in science or with Africa coverage) were asked to carry an item about
AJOL. Text was supplied. Most have done this.
Evaluation
As AJOL is a
pilot project, its impact is being monitored and evaluated. However it is not
intended that the first formal evaluation will take place until June 1999, when
the service will have been operating for one full year. Records are being kept
of the number of site `hits', the number of photocopies supplied and the number
of electronic subscriptions/articles entered/accessed. In June 1999, it is
intended to ask for the reactions of those who use the sites and to find out
from journals whether any new subscriptions have been taken out or
cancellations have occurred. Such subscribers will then be asked whether having
electronic access to TOCs has had any effect on their
decision.
Although Web
Server statistics do not accurately reflect site usage, page requests to AJOL
on the INASP site rose from 100 per week in June 1998, to a present average of
around 500 per week. Requests for each journal's TOCs
are in the region of 15 per week. Most requests come from the USA, the UK,
Europe and South Africa.
Sites
accessing the free abstracts of each of the medical journals number about 16
per month, although each site may have accessed them more than once. Sites
where countries are indicated are mostly in USA, Europe and Japan. EPT
considers this rate of usage to be normal and that it will increase once the
number of issues of each journal available on the site increases.
One
disappointing interim result is the low uptake on requests for photocopies of
articles publicized in the TOCs or purchases of
articles or electronic subscriptions from the Bioline
site. To date we have only received two requests for photocopies and there have
been two requests for electronic subscriptions, for the 1999 issues of Central
African Journal of Medicine and East African Medical Journal. It
could be that users are using the sites for current awareness only and are
accessing the full text by another means, e.g. through their library's existing
document supply services or holdings. If this is the case, then AJOL has
succeeded in making African research visible, but the journals have not been
able to benefit financially from this increased usage. Or it could be that the
process of ordering a photocopy is both too complicated and expensive and
therefore there may be an argument for initially subsidizing costs, to
encourage use. A third possibility is that the journal contents do not
sufficiently whet the appetite of users: no matter how well a journal is
promoted, in the end its value depends on the quality of its contents. It is
hoped that the 1999 evaluation will answer some of these questions.
Problems
AJOL cannot solve
What AJOL
or electronic publishing in general cannot do is improve the internal
management of journals. If journals, for one reason or another, cannot produce
to a regular schedule or maintain an effective subscription management and fulfilment system, more effective marketing will not help.
Even though the journals in AJOL were partly selected for reliability, many
have proved unable to keep up a regular schedule of publication and fail to
reply to queries concerning the likely publication date of the next issue.
Others have failed to send a newly published issue, even though INASP has paid
for a subscription. One sent a photocopy of the TOC of its forthcoming issue,
but copies of this issue have not been published five months later. Bioline has also suffered from lack of journal response.
AJOL is therefore open to the criticism of not being up to date, which could
deter users of the site. Some journal publishers enthusiastically agreed to
take part in the pilot, but then failed to send any 1997 issues, let alone
those for 1998. One can only assume that such a journal is already in its death
throes. In the recent research carried out on journal use in the Universities
of Ghana and Zambia, 68% of academics in the Faculties of Arts and Social
Sciences and 70% of those in the Faculty of Medicine and School of Agricultural
Sciences cited lack of regular publication of journals in Africa as a key
factor in their low usage, usefulness and impact.
Nor can AJOL
help a journal to improve the quality of its content. Academics at Ghana and
Zambia called for better researched articles and better refereeing and
editorial control in journals published in Africa, if they were to carry the
same weight as those published elsewhere. This opinion was more strongly held
by those in agriculture and medicine, with 45% calling for better researched
articles and 30% calling for better editing. However it was also pointed out by
these academics that some factors controlling quality of research lie outside
the journals themselves. Unless African universities make adequate funds
available for research and increase the level of salaries, so that staff do not
have to spend their spare time in other income generating activities, good
quality research is unlikely to take place.
Nor can AJOL
improve the visibility of African-published journals in Africa (as opposed to
elsewhere in the world), unless academics and researchers have adequate access
to information and communication technologies (ICT). The research at the
Universities of Ghana and Zambia concluded very clearly that unless ICT facilities
are made available, are free of charge and are maintained for academics at
departmental and office level, they will not be used. At the University of
Zambia attempts have been made to provide hardware and connectivity at
departmental level. At the University of Ghana, initial provision was made only
at university library level and is just recently being extended to departments.
Academics there also have to pay for services. Of those interviewed in Zambia
only 25% did not use ICT for the identification of journal articles. In Ghana,
the figure rose to 64%.
Nor can AJOL
of itself provide access to journals. Funds still have to be found for print,
CD-ROM or online subscriptions or for document delivery. In Africa this is a
serious problem. Neither the University of Ghana nor the University of Zambia
has spent any institutional funds on the acquisition of journals, in any
format, over the last three years. The journals that are received come through
donor support. This situation is common to most African universities.
Future of
AJOL
It is
recognized that a year is a very short time for any tangible impact to be felt.
For this reason INASP would like to maintain and expand the AJOL service for a
minimum of another three years. In particular it would like to increase the
number of journals offered in science and technology to twenty five;
additionally offer TOCs of ten medical journals; and
expand the service to include ten journals in the social sciences. A proposal
has been written and funding is currently being sought to enable this to take
place. It is, however proving difficult to raise the necessary funds.
As a model
for increasing the visibility of the journals produced in a particular region
or continent, the TOC service of AJOL would appear to be both effective and
cost effective. Once set-up costs have been met, maintenance is fairly low and
would be considerably reduced if journals could submit TOCs
in electronic format or even directly to the web page. The same applies to the
full text service. Ultimately, however, the usefulness and impact of both
services will rely on and reflect regular publication and quality of journal
content.