AfricArXiv content is CC BY 4.0 licensed.

About AfricArXiv

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

Team

africarxiv.org/team/

About preprints

‘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.’

Read more at africarxiv.org/preprints/

2020 plans

Developing an African preprint & research discovery portal for scholarly communication

owned by the African Science community
hosted on African territory
open source
open access
free for users

Vision

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:

scholarly books
journal articles
List of digital African scholarly journals
…

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:

Core database hosted on a server at an African institution
Mirror backup of the database to servers in all African regions (EastA, WestA, NorthA, CentralA) and a Cloud
Ensuring African ownership of African research output
possibly incl. blockchain components (?)
…

2-fold aproach for maximum discoverabilty

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, …	…

data management

We propose the same approach of establishing a decentralized, Africa-owned data management infrastructure and are seeking collaboration with:

RDA Research Data Alliance: https://www.rd-alliance.org/
CODATA: http://www.codata.org/
https://datadryad.org/stash/our_platform
https://oceanprotocol.com/f

Expenses & cost coverage

cloud server space
third party integration service fees
running server costs: costs for data upload and maintenance by third parties
internal HR overhead - tech dev & maintenance

partner institutions on the continent

tba (TENET, WACREN, national RENs, etc.)
https://www.share-research.org/

Required features

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

Languages

languages commonly spoken on the continet
machine translations with options/overlay interface to manually improve the text online (see www.GTranslate.io) // GoogleTranspate API
Language switch // editable by the users and admin

integrations

digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS archive (?)
ORCID // https://members.orcid.org/cc-publishers
CrossREF
Altmetrics
GoogleDrive
Dropbox
DSpace
OSF
Open Knowledge Maps (BASE search)
automated linking between preprint and VoR as suggested by https://frenxiv.org/fcq6v/

SOFTWARE OPTIONS

PKP Open Preprint Systems (OPS)
? https://www.u-repo.io/
?

Ready for blockchain?

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.

? Blockchain for Science

Adding blockchain components e.g. for publishing steps to ensure an affordable, efficient, decentralized infrastructure

collaborative drug development

https://molecule.to/

AfricArxiv/AfricArXiv-overview