Digital Information Access in Developing Countries: Does the Future Lie with E-Journals?

For the most part, scholarly and academic knowledge has historically travelled from the developed Global North to the less developed Global South. Research obtained from the developed Global North is not always relevant to issues arising from or within Africa, so it is important to overcome the challenges in Africans obtaining access to the research published on the continent. In the past, access to scholarly, peer-reviewed African research was extremely difficult, and much of the African continent’s research was largely inaccessible even between African countries. The representation of African research within the indexed western publications is considered to be a mere 0.7 percent of the total, and this, along with the scarcity of indexing systems of African publications lead to minimal Africanpublished journal discovery.