Welcome to second day of the DOAJ blog!

Today we are devoting our entire blog post to a continent. At the moment, only about one percent of the journals listed in DOAJ come from Africa. Since we want to make a change in these numbers and increase the statistics for the continent, we want to highlight the listed journals and encourage you to suggest African journals to us.

One of the first African journals that were listed in DOAJ is the Nigerian journal Tropical Journal of Pharmaceutical Research. It was added in november 2003 and is one out of our 21 listed journals from the country. Fulltexts can be found on both the journal’s web site and on the portals AJOL and Bioline. We can only applaud the editorial board and the publisher for doing such an effort to share their published articles!

At the moment Nigeria is the second largest African country in DOAJ. On the first place is South Africa which at the moment has got 26 listed journals. Thanks to initiatives like the already mentioned portals, SciELO South Africa and the publisher OpenJournals Publishing – among others – we have managed to gather a number of high-quality journals from the country. For exampel we have got the journal Koedoe which is covering scientific and environmental conservation practices of Africa. From other disciplines we have got for example the journals Verbum et Ecclesia - which is devoted to interdisciplinary religious studies – and the R&D Journal – which is publishing articles in the field of mechanical engineering.

We do not only want to highlight the countries were Open Access is succeeding, but also the countries were we – thanks to suggestions – have managed to find journals even though Open Access as a publishing form at the moment is not very well spread. Today we for example have got one listed journal from Madagascar (Madagascar Conservation & Development) and one from Libya (Libyan Journal of Medicine). Both of the journals has received the SPARC Europe Seal since, they are licensing their material with a CC-BY-license and have uploaded articles directly in DOAJ.

If interested in reading about the awareness of Open Access in Africa, the journal BMC Health Services Research published a descriptive study on access to electronic health resources in Cameroon, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and Gambia in 2007. Even though a lot has happened since the article was published, we would like to recommend the article since it covers the challenges of promoting Open Access in these countries: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6963/7/72.

Are you aware of any African Open Access journals which we have not yet listed? As written in the introduction to this post we want to encourage you to suggest them to us! You are also free to comment this post and discuss it below.