Celebrating a Vision Come True: Pan-African Scholarly Infrastructure

The open science landscape in Africa has marked a significant milestone with the launch of the Open Pan-African Repository (OPAR) by the UbuntuNet Alliance. This development represents a major step forward in making African scholarly knowledge visible, discoverable, and accessible on a continental scale.

Since 2018, Access 2 Perspectives (A2P), together with the AfricArXiv team and community, have pursued an unwavering vision: to establish an open-source, open-access repository infrastructure that is fully hosted, owned, and managed by the African scholarly community on continental soil.

When AfricArXiv was founded, our initial strategy was to utilize renowned international general repositories—such as OSF, ScienceOpen, Zenodo, and PubPub—to provide immediate, reliable avenues for African researchers. This initial phase allowed the community to engage with diverse repository architectures, discover international standards, and define their preferred systems. However, the ultimate goal was always to bring this infrastructure home to an independent, regionally distributed African network.

In 2020, we formally open-sourced this roadmap, publishing the conceptual blueprint for a decentrally managed, pan-African repository system. Our objective was clear: to make African research globally discoverable, increase interdisciplinary collaboration, promote dissemination in African languages, and ensure that the continent’s knowledge remains under the stewardship of continental institutions.

A critical turning point in this journey occurred in 2023, when Access2Perspectives partnered with the UbuntuNet Alliance (UA). Recognizing their vast network infrastructure, A2P aligned with UA to establish DSpace on their newly developed distributed data center system. Together, we designed and ran workshops, built community momentum, and co-developed the strategic program that successfully secured the Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) Fund for Network Adoption.

A2P’s direct operational involvement in the implementation of the IOI grant concluded prior to the launch of OPAR. Nonetheless, we are immensely proud to see the foundation we envisioned and designed together with the UbuntuNet Alliance team come to fruition. The recent launch of the Open Pan-African Repository (OPAR) by the UbuntuNet Alliance stands as the exact realization of the decentralized, Africa-owned research data and scholarly works management architecture we conceptualized years ago.

The structural evolution we see today validates that a distributed, continental approach to open science utilizing open-source community-governed software is not only viable, but deeply necessary. We now see an emerging ecosystem where regional and specialized platforms complement one another perfectly:

AJOL (https://www.ajol.info/, since 1998) – African Journals Online works to increase online access, awareness, quality & use of African-published, peer-reviewed research operating on PKP/OJS infrastructure;
APOS (https://apos.uct.ac.za/, since 2019) The African Platform for Open Scholarship provides the PKP/OJS infrastructure for institutional Diamond Open Access journal hosting;
BAOBAB (https://baobab.wacren.net/, since 2024) serves as a repository platform primarily targeting the West and Central African research ecosystem built on Invenio Software;
OPAR (https://opar.ubuntunet.net/home, 2026) steps forward to leverage the UbuntuNet Alliance’s extensive network, foresight, and infrastructure to catalyze discovery across Southern and Eastern African research institutions;
AfricArXiv (https://repository.africarxiv.org/, since 2018) continues to operate as a community-driven, Africa-focused repository until further announcement, acting as an independent, researcher-first submission platform that supports individual scholars, the global academic diaspora, multilingual abstracts, and non-traditional knowledge systems that fall outside standard institutional boundaries.

While AJOL and APOS serve explicitly as journal hosting platforms taking the burden of technical maintenance off the shoulders of small editorial teams, BAOBAB, OPAR and AfricArXiv are designed as repository platforms, allowing individual researchers to share their work before formal journal publishing, including preprints, research reports, policy papers, datasets, presentations, and more.

We applaud the UbuntuNet Alliance and Invest in Open Infrastructure teams for bringing the continental discovery platform OPAR to life. At Access 2 Perspectives, we remain dedicated to consulting, training, and building the open science frameworks that empower researchers across Africa and globally. The realization of the OPAR platform is a collective achievement for open infrastructure, and we look forward to seeing it further accelerate the global impact of African scholarship.

If you are interested in exploring a partnership, supporting our infrastructure stabilization, or collaborating on our upcoming Publish-Review-Curate workflow, please reach out to us directly at info@africarxiv.org.

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