Ajol
Publishers in Grahamstown

AJOL allows for free access to thousands of article abstracts, and offers a progressively charged article download service for researchers and librarians to access full text of individual articles.

African Journals OnLine (AJOL) is an online service to provide access to African-published research, and increase worldwide knowledge of indigenous scholarship. AJOL is a Non Profit Organisation based in South Africa. At the same time as online academic resources from the developed Global North are made available to Africa (such as HINARI, AGORA and OARE), there needs to be corresponding online availability of information from Africa. African countries need to collectively play a greater role in the global online scholarly environment. African researchers also need access to their own continent's scholarly publications. Mainly due to difficulties accessing them, African-published research papers have been under-utilised, under-valued and under-cited in the international and African research arenas. Valuable information has not reached the people who need it. Journals published from developing countries are still largely excluded from the major, commercial indexing companies based in the developed Global North. It is often said, as a result, that African research is invisible, or that there is very little of it. AJOL is the world's largest online collection of African-published, peer-reviewed scholarly journals. AJOL's Vision is for African learning to be translated into African development. AJOL's Mission: to increase online visibility, access and use of African-published research output in support of quality African research and higher education. Journals apply for inclusion on AJOL and are assessed according to the quality of their publishing practices, including the following criteria: The journal must be scholarly in content, and contain original research (in addition to other content) The journal is published within the African continent (i.e. management of publishing strategy, business development and production operation are all run from an African country) The project was evaluated at the end of 1999, and it was recommended that AJOL be continued and expanded to include more journals in more subject areas, as well as abstracts of articles. It also provided abstracts where available, and introduced a key word search service and photocopy document delivery service for all titles. This was undertaken to increase the functionality of the site, and to ensure that AJOL is compatible with other research services offered on the web. As a result, journal content listed with AJOL is now being indexed through Open Archives Initiative (OAI) search engines dedicated to research, which harvest the metadata for each journal article, making this work readily available to a global audience, and giving the journals greater visibility among the worldwide research community. In 2005, AJOL moved to African management and is now a not-for-profit company in its own right, based in South Africa.