University Libraries
UD Now Publishing African Policy Journal
By Maureen Schlangen
On May 1, a printed journal whose scholarly analysis of African policy had grown difficult to find in the digital age gained a much larger audience through the University of Dayton’s open-access institutional repository, eCommons.
After a monthslong process to convert the printed articles to digital form and organize them by issue, the Journal of African Policy Studies — launched in 1995 by the Institute on African Affairs, a former Washington, D.C., think tank — is now available around the world. All articles become freely available two years after their issue date; subscribers receive new content immediately upon publication.
Executive editor Moses Tesi, a professor of political science and international relations at Middle Tennessee State University, has led the journal since the first editor, Edmond J. Keller of the University of California, Los Angeles, stepped down in 1996; UD history professor Julius A. Amin became editor in 2019.
“From the very beginning of the Journal of African Policy Studies, the goal was to create a platform so the best minds on Africa would research, analyze and devise solutions to Africa’s problems and share the solutions continent-wide,” Tesi says. “The challenge that we faced was how to get print copies to the various countries in Africa, especially to those who make and influence policy — government officials, scholars, civil society organizations of various types and businesses. With changes in technology, it has become easier to disseminate research and analysis on crucial challenges facing Africa by adopting the electronic journal path, ensuring that the knowledge and ideas generated are available and accessible for use either in furthering more research and in guiding or influencing policy choices in society.”
University of Dayton mechanical engineering major Najwan Orabi of Kettering, Ohio, a student employee in the University Libraries, undertook the digitization process, which involved scanning 42 issues of the journal at high resolution, one page at a time; consolidating the pages into articles; and creating metadata — information about the articles such as title, authors, abstracts and publication dates — so that the research would be discoverable on the internet and through library discovery tools.
In the first three weeks since the issues became available electronically, articles have been downloaded more than 500 times from 47 countries.
As of May 19, downloads from UD-published journals totaled more than 1.1 million, led by Marian Studies, which has logged over 448,000 since June 2014.
Browse Other UD Journals
- Marian Library Studies (retired)
- University of Dayton Review (retired)
— Maureen Schlangen is the e-scholarship and communications manager in the University Libraries.