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The internet has increased expectations about how research information can and should be disseminated globally, and this has a large impact on journals published within Africa that have previously been unable to take advantage of this medium.
The rise of the internet has increased expectations about how research information can and should be disseminated globally, and this change has had an impact on journals published within Africa-journals that have previously been unable to take advantage of this medium. This article investigates the current visibility of African journals in the international research community and discusses initiatives that have been developed to help researchers gain access to information and make their own published information visible to the world. It shows that the African Journals OnLine (AJOL) service has provided a valuable window for these publications, and offers many lessons about the challenges encountered by journals and what support is required to build capacity and sustainability.
Introduction
For the past three hundred years, journals have been acknowledged as the most important means of accrediting and disseminating research. Within Africa, the growth in the number of universities during the twentieth century led to a need to disseminate their research, and journals were chosen as the preferred medium (Adebowale 2001).
Print journals have limited reach: they require physical dissemination, and in many developing regions, such as Africa, international distribution is problematic. However, with increasing globalization of information, the distribution and discovery of research has become more important to all authors, and they look to their journals to reach out and disseminate their work globally. Introduction of the internet has led to a radical change in the way that research is discovered and transmitted. It has been rapidly adopted by the research community as the main tool for locating and disseminating information (Lawlor 2004).
These developments have dramatically changed academic research and communication; however, the benefits that they have brought to researchers able to access and use the internet have disadvantaged those unable to access and use it, either to access information, or to promote their own research findings (Arunachalam 2003).
The Internet and Access to Research
Although the internet offered great opportunity during the 1990s, it also served to widen the gap between Western publications and those of...