African Journal Partnership Project (AJPP)

Strengthening African medical journals

Peer-reviewed journals are a vital source of information exchange. As in other developing regions, African journals often lacked the necessary resources to carry out peer review and publish regularly. To address these needs, NLM collaborated with the Fogarty International Center and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences at NIH to create the African Journal Partnership Program (AJPP) in 2004. AJPP was envisioned as a health and medical journal capacity building program in Africa. The initial four African journals self selected, and five major medical journals from the US and the UK joined them in partnership. The mission of AJPP came from the African journal editors: to promote publication excellence in African health and medical journals and allow for wider dissemination of African research results. The founding meeting was held at the British Medical Association and hosted by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in London. Our strategy for reaching the editors’ goals was to create partnerships between interested African health and medical journals and leading journals published in the United States and the United Kingdom. We believed that learning would be two-way with this partnership opportunity, and that this strategy would serve the program’s goal - to strengthen the African journals, so that they could be accepted into MEDLINE and make African research results available to the world. Valuable research carried out in endemic countries is not often available to a wider international audience. We worked directly with all partners to facilitate the collaboration of African journal editors with their counterparts at international journals; to improve the technical production capability of African journals; to support training of writers, reviewers, and journalists in the field; to encourage the editors in planning for succession and sustainability; and to help journals earn acceptance for indexing into MEDLINE and other major databases. The partnership began with four African journals; six more were added later .