Charlottesville, VA
The Center for Open Science (COS) and AfricArXiv have launched a new preprint service that will advance scientific knowledge in African countries in multiple scientific fields.
AfricArXiv (African Science Archive) is a new and free open access repository on #ScienceinAfrica for African scientists to share their research outputs in all scientific fields, including but not limited to agriculture, biology, physics, chemistry, education, health sciences, social sciences, environmental sciences, and engineering.
The idea was raised during the first African Open Science Hardware Summit (AfricaOSH) in Kumasi, Ghana, when a large group of African and other international scientists discussed the aspects of Open Science Hardware in the African context. The necessity for a general repository on Open Science for Africans came up, was tweeted about and responed to by COS’s Executive Director Brian Nosek with the suggestion for a preprint repository for Africa as one part of such platform: https://twitter.com/AwareAwuah/status/985171790438813697
AfricArXiv will be a hybrid and original publishing system that combines the speed advantages of a preprint server and the quality benefits of moderation. Ideally, manuscripts published on AfricArXiv can lead to greater reliability of scientific knowledge in and from Africa by providing greater quality and transparency, increasing the accessibility of findings, and increasing the speed of sharing scientific knowledge.
“African scientific content on the web is still relatively scarce,” said Justin Ahinon, AfricArXiv’s founder. “We are proud to introduce AfricArXiv, a new interdisciplinary platform for scientific publishing, toward filling that gap. We are building the digital repository for African scientists to share all their research outputs, including preprints, postprints, code and data."
Jo Havemann added, “AfricArxiv will combine and reflect the diversity of African scientists' research output and make it accessible to African as well as non-African scientists and non-scientists around the globe. Together with other regional preprint repositories (Arabixiv, INA-Rxiv) this is an essential contribution to diversify Science.”
AfricArXiv is the twenty-first community preprint service built on COS’s flagship platform, OSF, which helps researchers design and manage their project workflow, data storage, DOIs, and collaboration. COS has leveraged that platform to help research communities in many disciplines discover new research as it happens and to receive quick feedback on their own research prior to publication. The community preprints platform from COS provides organizations that want to launch their own preprints service an easy, robust, and stable solution. COS is currently supporting branded services in marine and earth sciences, psychology, sociology, engineering, agriculture, social sciences, imaging, paleontology, sports research, contemplative research, law, library and information science, nutrition and an Indonesian preprint service.
Over 2 million preprints have been already indexed from a variety of sources and can be accessed by selecting a subject of interest, entering specific search terms, or browsing the preprints most recently added to the service. Preprint contributors are also encouraged to include links to their research, if available. If the preprint is associated with an existing OSF project, that project can also be easily accessed and explored. OSF Preprints uses SHARE to aggregate search results from a variety of other preprint providers like arXiv, bioRXiv, PeerJ, CogPrints and others into its archive.
About Center for Open Science
The Center for Open Science (COS) is a non-profit technology startup founded in 2013 with a mission to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research. COS pursues this mission by building communities around open science practices, supporting metascience research, and developing and maintaining free, open source software tools. OSF, COS’s flagship product, is a web application that connects and supports the research workflow, enabling scientists to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their research. Researchers use OSF to collaborate, document, archive, share, and register research projects, materials, and data. Learn more at cos.io and osf.io.
Contact for AfricArXiv
All inquiries: Justin Sègbédji Ahinon - justiny.ahinon@gmail.com
Twitter: @AfricArxiv
Contacts for the Center for Open Science
Media: Rusty Speidel: rusty@cos.io | 434-284-3403
Starting a Branded Preprint Service: Matt Spitzer: matt.spitzer@cos.io
Twitter: @osframework