Trends in electronic journal publishing in Africa: an analysis of African Journal Online (AJOL)
Journal Title: Webology - Year 2010, Vol 7, Issue 1
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to review the trends in electronic journal publication in Africa in relation to geographical representation, subject spread and language of publication and number of open access journals. The approach adopted for this study was to download the list of journals from the African Journal Online (AJOL) database. These journals were analyzed using tables and charts in relationship to the objectives of the study. This study shows that medical journals are more represented in the database than any other discipline and equally have more open access journals. More than ninety percent of the journals are published in English language while very few journals are published in African languages. Findings from the study reveal that there are very few African countries represented in the AJOL database. Only twenty-six African countries have their journals in the database with so many of them having not more than two journals. Nigeria and South Africa dominate the list of journals in the database. When African sub-region is considered West Africa contributes slightly more than half of all the other regions put together. Medical journals are more represented. In the present electronic environment, it is critical that African journal publishers respond to the need of publishing their scholarly outputs electronically to improve access and impact of their authors. The paper recommends that in order to enhance the visibility of African research outputs more journals publishers should be encouraged to join AJOL.
Authors and Affiliations
Ifeanyi J. Ezema
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP687644
- DOI -
- Views 222
- Downloads 0
Improvement of methodical approaches to higher schools' marketing activity assessment on the basis of Internet technologies application
The paper substantiates the necessity of higher schools marketing activity developing on the basis of Internet technologies; suggests the technique of comprehensive assessment of functioning and quality of the site as th...
Web search behavior of university students: a case study at University of the Punjab
The World Wide Web is now known to be the richest source of information. The growth rate of the web is exponential. This paper explores different aspects of web search behavior of university students, in terms of user's...
Wikipedia popularity from a citation analysis point of view
This study aims to provide an overview of the citation rate of Wikipedia since its launch in 2004. It is worth noting that since its inception Wikipedia, the free international multilingual encyclopedia, has been subject...
Application of web 2.0 tools by national libraries
The term Web 2.0 is a boom of the present time. The development of Web 2.0 presents immense opportunity to library professional for interaction. This paper aims to provide present scenario of Web 2.0 application by natio...
Designing Webliographies in an Effective and Simple Manner: A Step by Step Process
This paper explains web-based information retrieval as one of the main research interests of information professionals during the last decade, and introduces machine-oriented and humanoriented approaches in the designing...