African Journals Online (AJOL) is the leading online platform for African-published scholarly journals. Based in Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown), South Africa, and operating since 1998, AJOL currently hosts 968 peer-reviewed journals from 40 African countries - more than 287,000 full-text articles across every major discipline, from medicine and agriculture to law, education, and the humanities.

The most important thing to understand before using this page: AJOL is not a publisher. It is a non-profit aggregation and hosting platform. Each journal on AJOL is owned and run by its own publisher - typically a university, learned society, research institute, or independent editorial board somewhere in Africa. AJOL provides the shared online infrastructure, global visibility, and a quality-assessment framework (JPPS); editorial decisions, peer review, fees, and copyright all sit with the individual journal.

AJOL was initiated in 1998 by INASP, the UK-based International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications, and moved to South African management as an independent non-profit company (African Journals OnLine (RF) NPC) in the mid-2000s. It is donor-funded - supporters have included Norad, the Wellcome Trust, Sida, and SCOSS - which is why the platform is free for readers and free for African journals to join.

With 968 titles, AJOL's browse and search tools are the practical starting point. Journals can be filtered by country and by subject category. A sensible selection workflow:

1. Search AJOL by discipline and country to build a shortlist of candidate journals.
2. Check each candidate's JPPS badge (see below) as a first-pass quality signal.
3. Check indexing - a minority of AJOL-hosted titles are also in Scopus, MEDLINE/PubMed, or Web of Science (for example, African Health Sciences and Ghana Medical Journal are MEDLINE-indexed). If your institution requires indexed venues, verify on the index's own master list.
4. Read the journal's own author guidelines on its AJOL page or its independent website - requirements, scope, and fees differ title by title.

AJOL itself charges nothing to readers and nothing to African journals for hosting. Access and author-fee models are set per journal:

Over 172,000 of AJOL's 287,000+ full-text articles are open access. Because fees are journal-specific and change, always confirm the current APC (if any) on the journal's own author-guidelines page before submitting.

AJOL and INASP jointly run the Journal Publishing Practices and Standards (JPPS) framework, a formal assessment of every partner journal's publishing and editorial practices, informed by international, regional, and national standards. Each journal displays a JPPS level:

JPPS gives researchers a transparent, Africa-appropriate quality signal that goes beyond the blunt indexed/not-indexed distinction, and gives editors a roadmap for improvement. Official JPPS levels are issued only by AJOL and INASP.

1. Identify the journal using AJOL's search and browse tools, plus JPPS level and indexing checks.
2. Open the journal's AJOL page and read its focus-and-scope and author guidelines.
3. Follow that journal's submission route. Some titles accept submissions through AJOL's online journal system; others use their own websites, external systems (e.g., ScholarOne or OJS installations), or email submission. The journal's guidelines state which applies.
4. Format the manuscript to the journal's requirements - citation style and layout are journal-specific; SciSpace templates are available for many AJOL-hosted titles.
5. Correspond with the journal's editorial office, not AJOL - the platform does not handle editorial queries or decisions.

Cite an article from AJOL exactly as you would any journal article: cite the journal, not the platform. Use the article's DOI where one exists; otherwise the stable AJOL article URL is an acceptable locator. Indexing coverage varies widely across hosted titles - check the specific journal's status in Scopus, MEDLINE, DOAJ, or Web of Science rather than assuming platform-wide coverage.

AJOL is a registered South African non-profit company with almost three decades of operation, funded by established donors including Norad, the Wellcome Trust, and SCOSS. Its JPPS assessment exists precisely to raise and signal editorial standards among hosted journals, and journals that stop meeting criteria are flagged or delisted. Individual journal quality still varies - as on any large platform - so use the JPPS level, indexing status, and the journal's own editorial record when choosing a venue. Ethical questions about a specific paper (plagiarism, authorship disputes, retractions) are handled by the journal's own editorial office under its stated policies.