The initiative will provide a range of publishing services for journals, including promoting their visibility and discoverability, indexing, user friendly submission systems, detailed annual impact reports, and more. Journal selection will be guided by an advisory board. We welcome expressions of interest from other humanities and social science journals based on the continent.

The long-term vision is financial sustainability for university journals in the African social sciences and humanities, underpinned by international library and consortia support.

Pluto Journals is an independent publisher owned by the not-for-profit Pluto Educational Trust. It has a strongly internationalist ethos and already publishes twenty diamond OA social science journals. ABC has thirty-five years of experience helping African academic publishers to distribute books globally. Both organisations are committed to building equitable academic publishing partnerships.

Stephanie Kitchen, Executive Director of ABC, noted how the collective is pleased ‘to be supporting the dissemination of a small number of these universities’ leading journals, enabled by our publishing partners.’ Roger van Zwanenberg, founding MD of Pluto Journals added that Pluto Journals are ‘delighted that the African Book Collective, JSTOR and ScienceOpen have joined together to make this launch possible.’

Stephanie Dawson of Science Open commented on the ‘huge value for the global community if we can support African journals to more fully integrate into scholarly digital infrastructure to make their voices heard.’ She described how ‘ScienceOpen has been steadily building a network in Africa so we see this cooperation as an important next step.’ Similarly, the Director of JSTOR, John Lenahan, noted how this initiative directly aligned with their mission ‘to help support access to scholarly content to users around the world at the lowest cost’, as well as to ‘participate in collaborations with organisations and university presses that support sustainable open access solutions.’