African Journal Partnership Program (AJPP) meeting 2019, Columbus, Ohio
The 2019 meeting of the African Journals Partnership Program (AJPP) was held in Columbus Ohio from 3rd to 4th May 2019. This years’ meeting, whose theme is ‘Ethics Issues in Scientific Publication’ took place on the sidelines of the Council for Science Editors (CSE) meeting. During the first day of the meeting the various journals in the program gave an update on the progress of their journals in the last year. Dr. James Kigera, the Editor in Chief of the Annals of African Surgery, delivered a progress report on the journal. He noted the growth of the journal and the highlighted the challenges faced including financial sustainability. The journal was recognized for having achieved indexing in AJOL, joining COPE and for having its editors as CSE members. The social media strategy of the journal was noted to be bearing fruits with over 100% growth in audience and content since the last meeting.
On the second day of the AJPP meeting there was a series of workshops dealing with ScholarOne, business models, online performance, discoverability of journal articles and ethics. During these sessions editors had one on one discussion with experts on the various aspects and agreed on modalities to improve the various aspects. The third day of the meeting was spent attending the CSE pre-conference workshops where Dr. Kigera attended the workshop for Publication management. During this workshop various aspects of the managing a journal were discussed. Some highlights included having a data policy, the concept of open data and ethical publication.
Day 4 and 5 were spent attending sessions of the main CSE meeting. Two very powerful key note addresses were delivered on the topics of project management and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Other sessions included open data and work life balance. We are all looking forward to the next AJPP meeting in Uganda and the next CSE meeting in Portland, Oregon.