Welcome

The organisation aims to disseminate scientific content from Africa and to enhance the visibility and accessibility of African scholarly material on the Internet - adhering to a strict copyright policy, a commitment to the principles of Open Archives and Open Access, and a long-term (self-)archival system. The organisation is working toward comprehensively exposing what is happening in scientific Africa and representing its progress. In the long term, Scientific African hopes to foster research partners in Africa - leading to a better cross-cultural understanding through science.

To reach this goal the Scientific African Content Management System has been developed on the basis of free and open source software. The SACMS is intended to build up a decentralised network of African expert databases managed by community members, quality-controlled by reviewers and discussed by peers. On the one hand, the SACMS represents a new cost-saving form of online self-publishing or self-archiving, which includes the proven methods of peer-reviewing, on the other hand, it is an innovative communication platform which facilitates scholarly communication through posting and discussing.

The Scientific African Website is the prototype frontend of the SACMS. It can be used free of charge by individual scholars and institutions. After registration scholars/members can instantaneously manage their basic, biographical and institutional data, create objects (e.g. articles, bibliographies, news and events) and upload content, e.g. various files wrapped with their bibliographical data. All information stored in the object database will be highly visible on the Internet. The database is OAI-compliant and bibliographical data can be harvested by Open Archives Service Providers.

For further information read the instructions for use.

For registration please mailto:admin@saoas.org. The registration form has been disabled for security reasons.

References

• Open Archives Initiative
• Open Access Initiative
• Berlin Open Access Declaration
• Creative Commons
• Eprints FAQ