Challenges
Here is the summary of the challenges mentioned in the survey responses:
- High cost and financial difficulties, inability to get constant support. No dedicated funding for the platform and dependence on institutional budgets.
- Unstable funding affects publishing operations, e.g. funding through three-year grants that are renewed. However, there is insecurity regarding their renewal in the future.
- Developing a strategic plan that will facilitate the consistent execution of the journal’s editorial tasks, and to assure adherence to globally recognized quality standards in editorial work and publishing.
- The ability to maintain the Diamond OA model, as some African institutions insist on paying their peer reviewers a nominal fee and then want to recoup the money through APCs.
- The portal's financial sustainability could become a challenge if it is moved from the university to an external service that may charge hosting fees.
- Hosting costs for the platform are increasing annually, due to which platforms have to ensure that more journals are added or that the current journals are charged more for hosting.
- Different financial administration strategies in the participating institutional journals.
- Funding membership in COPE
- Funding the DOIs.
- Advertising opportunities were available in the past but this option is not available anymore.
- Funding for meetings is needed.
- In-house skills to manage the portal and to provide training and assistance to journal editorial teams to set-up their journal processes.
- Limited functionality of the platform, not as user friendly and intuitive as one would like.
- A low profile of the platform. More awareness should be created on the important role it plays in terms of e-workflow.
Solutions
Adequate dedicated budget and funding should be available to the project either from the institution or funding organizations. This can also help transit the journals to Diamond OA.
- Fundraising could be increased, focusing on book series for specific funders.”
- Attracting donor support for African research sharing
- Strategies for library crowd-funding
- African governments should contribute to regional platforms.
Unmet funding needs
This is a summary of the funding needs mentioned in the survey:
- Guaranteed long-term funding beyond the current three-year cycles to ensure sustainability.
- Securing core funding from 2025 to 2030, and expansion of staff to meet various demands and technical publishing services.
- Funds to reward editors, reviewers, and administrators with honoraria or financial compensation.
- Funding for hiring and motivating extra staff to support journal operations.
- Funds to cover online hosting, publication infrastructure, and related costs.
- Improving infrastructure, overcoming technical limitations, and ensuring funds to cover maintenance costs.
- Transitioning to digital workflows to improve efficiency.
- Expanding the offer of technical publishing services, including XML.
- Limited availability of Open Journal Systems plugins.
- Integration with other services like ScriPris, SciProof, and OMP.
- Providing layout templates.
- Registering ISSNs.
- Funding support for the development of an African languages API, and translation of the main website into other languages.
- Developing infrastructure to include a search facility across all African universities and other technical needs.
- Allocating funds for training on publication and editorial tasks.
- Recruiting skilled human resources to assist editorial teams and support the full use of OJS.
- Expansion of staff members to meet the demand of various regional and international project collaborations and other service requests.
- Growing the pool of human capacity to support retrospective digitization (of past journal issues).
- Increasing visibility through communication and marketing efforts to publicize achievements.
- Developing strategies to ensure the sustainability of journals on the platform.
- Expanding staff and services to meet demand from regional and international project collaborations, and to support journal partner applications, assessments, training, and support.
- Funding for paying incentives to personnel managing the portal.
What kind of support would make platforms more sustainable
The following support will be appreciated:
- Centralizing and funding editorial processes to provide professional services to all journal editorial boards.
- Funding and collaboration in service provision and technical assistance.
- Raising awareness on Diamond OA publishing and providing guidelines on how individual OA journals can become financially independent from APCs.
- Financial and technical expertise.
- Funding for infrastructure, DOIs, editorial support staff and dedicated IT personnel.
- In Africa, it does seem that peer reviewers need to be paid a minimal fee. This fee should be allowed and funded centrally and streamlined. Indexing platforms should allow for this model, as it does not hinder the academic integrity of the journal.
- Templates for layout editing should be available to all journals, which will prevent the need to pay someone on an institutional level, at every institution.
- A similarity detection service should be available for all African journals, for free, as well as free DOIs.
- Increased visibility and access of our journals; support to get indexed in international databases.
- Help with metadata and content preservation.
- Training for editorial teams and portal staff.
- Toolkits to assist with advocacy.
- Getting political support and commitment on the national level
- Providing grants and technical partnership.
- National platforms like PKP OJS available to all universities, rather than individual instances at all the universities. Cost, funding, skills, and human resources could then be more streamlined.