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: [email protected]
‘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/
- owned by the African Science community
- hosted on African territory
- open source
- open access
- free for users
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 (?)
- …
| 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:
- RDA Research Data Alliance: https://www.rd-alliance.org/
- CODATA: http://www.codata.org/
- https://datadryad.org/stash/our_platform
- https://oceanprotocol.com/f
- 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
- tba (TENET, WACREN, national RENs, etc.)
- https://www.share-research.org/
-
login (via email / affiliation / ORCID / Github / …)
-
document upload
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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 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
- 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/
- PKP Open Preprint Systems (OPS)
- ? https://www.u-repo.io/
- ?
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
