Africa’s open-access publishing ecosystem is being kept afloat by unpaid academic labour and informal institutional subsidies that mask the true cost of running journals. A journal at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa survives on departmental goodwill and volunteer peer review, its vulnerabilities exposed each time an editor retires. A journal in Uganda runs on free software and one academic’s spare time. Continental platforms fare little better. African Journals Online, a continental platform, met only about a fifth of its US$680,000 yearly fundraising target in 2024.

The authors estimate that a bare-bones, open-access publishing operation—covering only hosting, layout and copy-editing – costs roughly US$3,200 to US$3,300 per journal annually. A more resilient set-up costs about US$6,500. Scaled across the continent, that implies a system-wide bill of between US$5.7 million and US$11.6m a year for diamond titles indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, rising to as much as US$14.3m across the full journal landscape.
 

Source https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-africa-pan-african-2026-7-africa-s-open-access-journals-run-on-hidden-labour/

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