The African Platform for Open Scholarship allows the African research community to take ownership of creating and sharing its own scholarly content, which contributes to the growth and development of local research for African society.

The publishing platform addresses the challenge of Africa's low production by practicing diamond open access, that is knowledge is free to access for the reader and the author does not pay to publish.

In this model, diamond open access is a community-based publishing alternative model that disrupts the commercial publishing system. This shift returns the control of publishing back to the researcher community; free from third-party publishers imposing their restrictions to access.

Criteria:

The African Platform for Open Scholarship is committed to removing barriers for the dissemination and accessibility of scholarship advancing social justice principles. In keeping with this ethos, the criteria are extremely limited.

The following criteria that are used:

1. That the title (journal or book) is rooted in an institution of higher learning or a research council. Recognized non-profit scholarly associations request to use the platform will be screened must closer

2. There must be clear evidence that there is commitment to publish diamond open access

3. As many of the technical benchmarks to determine quality are adhered to, e.g. journal(s) has an eISSN, unique URL(s).

4. A commitment to adhering to academic excellence