Challenges

Here is the summary of the challenges mentioned in the survey responses: 

• High cost and financial difficulties, inability to get constant support. No dedicated funding for the platform and dependence on institutional budgets.
• Unstable funding affects publishing operations, e.g. funding through three-year grants that are renewed. However, there is insecurity regarding their renewal in the future.
• Developing a strategic plan that will facilitate the consistent execution of the journal’s editorial tasks, and to assure adherence to globally recognized quality standards in editorial work and publishing.
• The ability to maintain the Diamond OA model, as some African institutions insist on paying their peer reviewers a nominal fee and then want to recoup the money through APCs. 
• The portal's financial sustainability could become a challenge if it is moved from the university to an external service that may charge hosting fees. 
• Hosting costs for the platform are increasing annually, due to which platforms have to ensure that more journals are added or that the current journals are charged more for hosting.
• Different financial administration strategies in the participating institutional journals.
• Funding membership in COPE 
• Funding the DOIs. 
• Advertising opportunities were available in the past but this option is not available anymore.
• Funding for meetings is needed.
• In-house skills to manage the portal and to provide training and assistance to journal editorial teams to set-up their journal processes.
• Limited functionality of the platform, not as user friendly and intuitive as one would like.
• A low profile of the platform. More awareness should be created on the important role it plays in terms of e-workflow.

Solutions 

Adequate dedicated budget and funding should be available to the project either from the institution or funding organizations. This can also help transit the journals to Diamond OA.

• Fundraising could be increased, focusing on book series for specific funders.”
• Attracting donor support for African research sharing
• Strategies for library crowd-funding
• African governments should contribute to regional platforms.

Unmet funding needs

This is a summary of the funding needs mentioned in the survey:

• Guaranteed long-term funding beyond the current three-year cycles to ensure sustainability.
• Securing core funding from 2025 to 2030, and expansion of staff to meet various demands and technical publishing services.
• Funds to reward editors, reviewers, and administrators with honoraria or financial compensation.
• Funding for hiring and motivating extra staff to support journal operations.
• Funds to cover online hosting, publication infrastructure, and related costs.
• Improving infrastructure, overcoming technical limitations, and ensuring funds to cover maintenance costs.

• Transitioning to digital workflows to improve efficiency.
• Expanding the offer of technical publishing services, including XML. 
• Limited availability of Open Journal Systems plugins. 
• Integration with other services like ScriPris, SciProof, and OMP.
• Providing layout templates.
• Registering ISSNs.
• Funding support for the development of an African languages API, and translation of the main website into other languages. 
• Developing infrastructure to include a search facility across all African universities and other technical needs.

• Allocating funds for training on publication and editorial tasks.
• Recruiting skilled human resources to assist editorial teams and support the full use of OJS.
• Expansion of staff members to meet the demand of various regional and international project collaborations and other service requests.
• Growing the pool of human capacity to support retrospective digitization (of past journal issues).

• Increasing visibility through communication and marketing efforts to publicize achievements.

• Developing strategies to ensure the sustainability of journals on the platform.
• Expanding staff and services to meet demand from regional and international project collaborations, and to support journal partner applications, assessments, training, and support.

• Funding for paying incentives to personnel managing the portal.

What kind of support would make platforms more sustainable

The following support will be appreciated:

• Centralizing and funding editorial processes to provide professional services to all journal editorial boards. 
• Funding and collaboration in service provision and technical assistance.
• Raising awareness on Diamond OA publishing and providing guidelines on how individual OA journals can become financially independent from APCs.
• Financial and technical expertise.
• Funding for infrastructure, DOIs, editorial support staff and dedicated IT personnel.
• In Africa, it does seem that peer reviewers need to be paid a minimal fee. This fee should be allowed and funded centrally and streamlined. Indexing platforms should allow for this model, as it does not hinder the academic integrity of the journal. 
• Templates for layout editing should be available to all journals, which will prevent the need to pay someone on an institutional level, at every institution. 
• A similarity detection service should be available for all African journals, for free, as well as free DOIs.
• Increased visibility and access of our journals; support to get indexed in international databases.
• Help with metadata and content preservation.
• Training for editorial teams and portal staff.
• Toolkits to assist with advocacy.
• Getting political support and commitment on the national level
• Providing grants and technical partnership.
• National platforms like PKP OJS available to all universities, rather than individual instances at all the universities. Cost, funding, skills, and human resources could then be more streamlined.