Skip to main content
Premium Trial:

Request an Annual Quote

Open-Access Platform for African Researchers

The African Academy of Sciences is launching an open-access publishing platform in early 2018, Nature News reports.

It adds that the AAS Open Research platform is being developed in coordination with the open-access publisher F1000 and is being modeled on the publisher's F1000Research platform. When it launches, the AAS Open Research platform will host research articles, protocols, datasets, and code, Nature News says. Peer review will take place after the articles are published and the reviews will be posted alongside the papers, it adds.

The African Academy of Sciences tells Nature News that the platform will help young African scientists, as they often face difficulties in publishing in journals that are based abroad. Nature News says, though, that some scientists are concerned that publishing in an open-access platform might not give African researchers the same credit that they would receive if they published their work in a traditional journal.

Nature News adds that the new platform will at first be restricted to AAS fellows and affiliates or those funded by the Alliance for Accelerating Excellence in Africa. This restriction aims to ensure the quality of the papers received, though there are plans to open up submissions more widely in the future.