1.0 Overview

Welcome to the East African Nature and Science Organization Journals (abbreviated as EANSO Journals). To understand us and what we are all about, please read through this page. You will learn how the journals started and the philosophies that govern all our activities. We are on a mission to change how African scholars share their work with the world and encourage them to share more through inter-institutional collaborations. We are changing the narrative of education and research in Africa and improving our methodologies each day. You can use the links below to navigate through the sections on this page. Feel free to contact us at any time. You can also read through our Frequently Asked Questions to see some of the questions scholars like yourself approach us with or make a submission.

1.0 Overview
2.0 What we are
3.0 Mission and Vision
4.0 Philosophies and Core Values
5.0 History
6.0 Reach and Indexing
7.0 The future
8.0 Our promise

2.0 What we are

EANSO Journals is an imprint of the East African Nature and Science Limited managed under the Division of Research and Development (DRD) by the Knowledge is Fun Initiative (KiFI) started in 2017. The journals are academic, peer-reviewed and highly indexed. They also have autonomy from the parent organization, an Editorial and Advisory Board and a network of reviewers around the globe that facilitate the double-blind peer-review and the academic quality of the published articles.

3.0 Mission and Vision

3.1 Our Mission

Our mission is to advance academic research in East Africa, Africa and the world as a whole. We do this by hosting both online and print journals for different fields of knowledge. Through linkages with research organizations, universities and other stakeholders, we ensure that authors submitting to any of our hosted journals get the maximum exposure for their work. We are on a mission to change how African scholars share their work with the world and encourage them to share more through inter-institutional collaborations.

3.2 Our Vision

Our mission propels us toward our vision of becoming the leading perpetual repository for academic researches in Africa and the development of institutional linkages for research dissemination. We want to create links among all the research institutions in Africa and finally facilitate all these institutions in their quest to share their work with the world.

4.0 Philosophies and Core Values

4.1 Our Philosophies

Our organization is driven by a number of philosophies that inform our core values and objectives. These philosophies are as follows:

• Perpetuity of Knowledge: we want to make all the knowledge published with us last forever. This is done through efficient archiving and smart backups that make sure that any knowledge disseminated through our channels will be available for the present generation and future generations.
• Telling the African narratives from the African perspective: we realized throughout our existence that African knowledge for one reason or the other never gets the correct representation. There are always hurdles that hinder the efficient documentation and dissemination of African knowledge. One of our objectives is to help Africans tell their own stories from their own perspectives.
• Intricate institutional linkages: whereas most research institutions tend to be in competition with each other, they have so much in common and must therefore cooperatively engage in order to exploit their collective advantages. We focus on bridging the gaps existing between institutions when it comes to research.
• Completely opening access to knowledge: knowledge development depends on access policies for the already available knowledge. Restricted access leads to slow development whereas complete open access to existing knowledge drastically speeds up the rate of new knowledge development. Researchers are able to build on what has already been done. This is why all our journals are open access with the Creative Commons Attribution License.

4.2 Our Core Values

From our governing philosophies, we have five core values that inform both the interaction within and outside our organization. These values are integrity, accountability, continuous improvement, honesty and commitment to scholars. They all steer the Journals towards the overall East African Nature and Science motto of ‘Advancing Humanity’.

4.3 What makes us unique

Our uniqueness is brought about by our philosophies about what research should be. We believe that all knowledge should be open source and perpetually available to the world in a format that is not only simple but also directly consumable. We also believe that some type of knowledge is geographical and must thus be strategically zoned where it is most relevant. It is with these philosophies that our journals focus on advancing and linking research and research institutions across the world. Our uniqueness comes from the fact that we transcend the institutional boundaries and act as a link between different scholars and research institutions around the globe. We want to help scholars and research institutions develop a better approach to knowledge and information dissemination.

5.0 History

5.1 Establishment of the Division of Research and Development

In 2015, the East African Nature and Science Organization constituted the Division of Research and Development. The main objective of the division was to come up with better ways to archive the many kinds of research carried out in East Africa and develop ways that would make the researches available for sharing freely across the different institutions in the region. 20 Universities from 6 different countries were used as case studies during the initial fulfillment of the Division’s objectives.

It was realized that even though there had been so many researches done by members of the case institutions, less than 5% of these researches got published and formally disseminated. The rest 95% got lost along the way or only made it to presentations at conferences. Of the 5% that got published, at least 50% were published in media that were not perpetual and risked becoming unavailable with time. Other parameters of interest were the location the researches were published and the relevance of the publications to the respective locations.

We found out that a good number of useful researches in Africa were published outside the continent in repositories whose indexing was largely unavailable to the African target audience. For example, you could have gotten a paper detailing how to spur economic growth in Nigeria published in a Chinese journal. Just the same way some scholars could send papers on how to conserve resources in Uganda to Indian publishers. What made the trend worrying was the little knowledge most authors possessed about research dissemination. This lack of knowledge was seen as the cause of the massive misinformation that had encompassed the research institution.

For example, very few scholars could tell a difference between local journals and international journals. They just counted on the name of the journals to tell the difference. Some actually thought that if you were, for example, a South African publishing your work in a European journal, that would have automatically counted as publishing in an international journal. This not only led to the exploitation of scholars but also the loss of the knowledge they wanted to disseminate. We realized that there was quite a lot to disseminate on the variables that come into play during academic publishing.

5.2 The Knowledge is Fun Initiative

With this realization in mind, the Board of Directors of EANSO in early 2017 voted to start an initiative that would help promote and disseminate awareness on research publishing across the different institutions. It was initially meant to act as one of the Community Social Responsibility for the Organization. Some of the activities for the initiative included sponsoring academic conferences and funding researchers in specific target genres of knowledge. The initiative was later rebranded into the Knowledge is Fun Initiative (KiFI) and given a wider mandate of transforming the available knowledge into bits that would make learning enjoyable.

5.3 The Commencement of EANSO Journals

Basing on the success of the Knowledge is Fun Initiative, a resolution was passed by the EANSO Board of Directors on 17^th October 2018 to start a group of journals that would usher in a different era of academic publishing in Africa. The philosophy guiding the resolution was to come up with a solution that would help scholars take advantage of open access policies to share their work with the world easier, faster and at the cheapest possible price. It was not fair for scholars to be exaggeratedly charged for sharing work that was meant to help the world.

The methodology at first was to buy journals that already existed and merge them under one umbrella. The umbrella for all these journals became ‘EANSO Journals’, an Imprint of the East African Nature and Science Limited. The first journal under this umbrella was EAJSS that instantly solved the challenge most Swahili scholars face of having to translate their articles into English as a requirement before publication.

Within the same year, EAJAB, EAJASS, EAJBE, EAJE, EAJES, EAJENR, EAJFA, EAJHS, EAJIT, EAJIS, EAJLE, EAJTCR and IJAR were added to the list of our hosted journals to the current 14 journals. In January 2020, a lot of improvements were made that included giving EANSO Journals financial autonomy for more efficient management. More reviewers were enlisted and a new Editorial and Advisory Board was constituted. We keep getting feedback from scholars like yourself and improving every day.

6.0 Reach and Indexing

6.1 The reach

Currently, our journals are actively visited by scholars from over 60 different countries. The top ten countries per user numbers and sessions are Kenya in the first position, followed by the United States, Tanzania, Uganda, Nigeria, Ethiopia, India, the United Kingdom, Indonesia and the Philippines. South Africa, Ghana, Canada, Czechia, Germany, Moldova, Japan, Belgium, Iran, France. Rwanda, Australia, Italy, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Zambia, Zimbabwe and China follow the top ten countries. These analytics keep changing each month as more countries are added to the list of reach.

We realized that the current reach corresponds to countries where English is either the main language or one of the spoken languages and have embarked on a mission to develop an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that will help in translating our journals into more languages. We are currently piloting with Kiswahili (because of the East African Journals of Swahili Studies), French and Arabic. When this is completed, we project that at least three-quarters of the countries on earth will have access to our journals in their local languages.

6.1 Our Journals’ Indexing

One of the factors that are facilitating our rapid global reach is our focus on indexing our journals in databases around the world. We first started by depositing our journals in the ISSN International Centre Database for inclusion. We then became members of Crossref and were assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Prefix to facilitate the depositing of our journals, issues, articles and galleries. Having ISSNs, DOIs and an Editorial and Advisory Board enabled us to start indexing our journals, issues, articles and galleries in other scholarly databases. We first signed up for archiving with PKP Preservation Network, LOCKSS and CLOCKSS to make sure that anything we publish will always be available through a network of third-party archiving. This solved the problem most scholars face where the journals they publish with randomly disappear and their publications disappear along with them. Because all our journals are Open Access with the Creative Commons Attribution License, we have plans underway to deposit them in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and the Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources (ROAD) for indexing. We are now working with national libraries of different countries and research institutions to have the journals indexed in their local environments.

7.0 The Future

We have a 20 years strategic plan that focuses on propelling EANSO Journals towards the vision set by our parent organization. We want to embark on a mission of acquiring and managing the different journals across Africa from a central point. We will be the imprint with the most journals managed under one organization in Africa by 2030. The advantage of this will be that the journals will all enjoy the quality ecosystem set by the current EANSO Journals’ Peer-review process, indexing, archiving, licensing and distribution.

8.0 Our Promises

As an organization, we care about you as one of the scholars determined to help us move towards our vision. This is why we take any feedback from you seriously. We also make the following promises to you as an organization:

• That anything you publish with us shall be thoroughly peer-reviewed and improved in quality by our team of expert scholars,
• That anything you publish with us will always be available for the present and future generations,
• That we shall always take your feedback seriously and strive to incorporate it into our processes,
• That we shall continually improve our journals beyond the global standards and improve your work along the way.