By the FRELIP Editorial Team
Open access is no longer a fringe ideal in African scholarship — it is increasingly the default expectation. Across the continent, researchers, librarians, and institutions are building the infrastructure to make knowledge freely available. Yet the gap between aspiration and everyday reality remains wide. This briefing takes stock of where African open access stands today, the barriers that persist, and why this work sits at the heart of FRELIP’s mission.
A growing, uneven landscape
Several pillars now anchor open access on the continent. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) provides a vetted, community-curated index of peer-reviewed open access journals worldwide, including a steadily growing number from African publishers. African Journals Online (AJOL) hosts and showcases scholarship published on the continent, giving African-edited journals a discoverable home. AfricArXiv offers a preprint platform dedicated to African research, and Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa) has spent years building research-communication capacity among African scholars.
These initiatives matter because discoverability is half the battle. A paper that exists but cannot be found — or that sits behind a paywall a student cannot afford — may as well not exist for the learner who needs it. Standards such as Dublin Core metadata and the OAI-PMH harvesting protocol allow repositories and aggregators to share records with one another, so a thesis deposited in a university repository can surface in a continent-wide search. This interoperability is quiet, unglamorous plumbing, but it is what turns scattered collections into a connected scholarly commons.
The barriers that persist
The most stubborn obstacle is cost — but not the cost readers face. The dominant “gold” open access model often shifts the bill to authors through Article Processing Charges (APCs), which can run into thousands of dollars per article. For a researcher at an under-funded African university, an APC can equal a meaningful share of an annual research budget. This inverts the promise of open access: knowledge becomes free to read but expensive to publish, quietly excluding the very scholars whose work the system claims to liberate.
This is why Diamond open access — journals that charge neither readers nor authors, typically sustained by institutions or scholarly societies — matters so much for equity. It is also why initiatives like Plan S, advanced by the cOAlition S group of research funders, have prompted serious debate. Plan S pushes for immediate open access to publicly funded research, but its implications for researchers in regions with little funder muscle are still being worked out. African researchers have rightly asked that global open access policy be shaped with, not merely for, the Global South.
Infrastructure is a second barrier. Institutional repositories — the digital archives where universities preserve and share their own theses, articles, and datasets — are uneven in coverage and maintenance. Bandwidth and electricity constraints make heavy, image-laden platforms impractical in many settings. Open licensing literacy is a third: Creative Commons licences make Open Educational Resources (OER) legally reusable and adaptable, but many educators are still unsure which licence permits what.
Where FRELIP fits
FRELIP exists to close the distance between open content and the people who need it. Our discovery service indexes 18,427 records across 18 disciplines, drawing on the harvesting standards described above so that learners can search one place instead of dozens. Alongside discovery, we offer 15 subject guides and 30 courses that teach not just what to find but how to find, evaluate, and cite it — information literacy as a practical skill rather than an abstraction. Everything is free and requires no login, by deliberate design: a sign-up wall is a barrier, and our purpose is to remove barriers.
The state of open access in Africa, then, is one of real momentum tempered by real friction. The journals, preprint servers, and repositories exist; the standards that connect them exist; the licences that free educational content exist. What remains is the patient work of stitching these pieces into something a student on an intermittent connection can actually use. That stitching — discovery, guidance, and removing the cost of entry — is the work FRELIP was built to do, and the reason this section exists: to report on it honestly as it unfolds.