ISSN

to be registered (PRINT)
3005-4613 (ONLINE)

Focus and scope

The African Journal of Climate Studies will focus on theoretically or pragmatically relevant original academic studies, reviews and syntheses, or academic opinions that include African climate as a pivotal component, attempting to advance transdisciplinary work incorporating African climate as an important component. These would consist of studies relating to African paleoclimate and the historical evolution of African human and ecological systems in relation to climate constraints, current understanding of African climate behaviour and the role of climate variability, climate extreme events and climate change in any relevant aspect of African social-ecological and economic development; links between climate and African indigenous and local knowledge systems; considerations of natural variability in African climates and anthropogenic climate change risks, impacts, adaptation, mitigation and related policy issues; relevant aspects of marine and oceanic processes for African climatic behaviour; aspects of the design or co-design of African climate studies, climate data collection, analysis, synthesis and sharing.

Historical data

The journal is launched in 2022 to bring to the foreground the role of climate in supporting human livelihoods and societal development in Africa and has been so in the evolution and rise of modern humans. This vast continent straddles the Equator and articulates geographically with vast landmasses in the Northern Hemisphere while surrounded by large ocean expanses in the Southern Hemisphere. The unique location of the African continent across both southern and northern Hemisphere latitudes, and the historically pivotal role of climate for human evolution, provide the scope for an academic journal to address a wide array of theoretical and applied questions relating to the study of African climates and their multiple interactions with social-ecological systems of the past, present and future. The African Journal of Climate Studies scope is thus broadly inclusive of providing a forum and platform for academic consideration of relevant studies set in an African context that include a climatic perspective as a central focus. In particular, the journal would aim to advance the publication of multi- and transdisciplinary work incorporating African climate as an important component.

Publication frequency

The journal publishes one volume each year. Articles are published online when ready for publication and then printed in an end-of-year compilation. Additional collections may be published for special events (e.g. conferences) and when special themes are addressed.

Types of articles published

Read full details on the submissions guidelines page.

Open access

This is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) definition of open access. Learn more about the journal copyright, licensing and publishing rights.

Review process

The journal has a double-blinded peer review process. Manuscripts are initially examined by editorial staff and are sent by the Editor-in-Chief to two expert independent reviewers, either directly or by a Section Editor. Read our full peer review process.

Marketing

AOSIS has a number of ways in which we promote publications. Learn more here.

Membership

AOSIS is a member and/or subscribes to the standards and code of practices of several leading industry organisations. This includes the Directory of Open Access Journals, Ithenticate, Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, CrossRef, Portico and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Learn more here.

All articles published in the journal are included in:

• GALE, CENGAGE Learning

We are working closely with relevant indexing services to ensure that articles published in the journal will be available in their databases when appropriate.

The full text of the journal articles is deposited in the following archives to guarantee long-term preservation:

• AOSIS Library
• Portico
• SA ePublications, Sabinet
• South African Government Libraries

AOSIS is also a participant in the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) initiative. LOCKSS will enable any library to maintain their own archive of content from AOSIS and other publishers, with minimal technical effort and using cheaply available hardware. The URL to the LOCKSS Publisher Manifest for the journal is, https://climatestudies.org/index.php/ajocs/gateway/lockss. Please inform us if you are using our manifest as we would like to add your name to the list above.

A journal's Impact Factor was originally designed in 1963 as a tool for libraries to compare journals, and identify the most popular ones to subscribe to. It was never intended to measure the quality of journals, and definitely not the quality of individual articles.

The Impact Factor is a journal-level measurement reflecting the yearly average number of citations of recent articles published in that journal. It is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field; journals with higher Impact Factors are often deemed to be more important than those with lower ones. Therefore, the more often articles in the journal are cited, the higher its Impact Factor.

The Impact Factor is highly discipline-dependent due to the speed with which articles get cited in each field and the related citation practices. The percentage of total citations occurring in the first two years after publication varies highly amongst disciplines. Accordingly, one cannot compare journals across disciplines based on their relative Impact Factors.

We provide several citation-based measurements for each of our journals, if available. We caution our authors, readers and researchers that they should assess the quality of the content of individual articles, and not judge the quality of articles by the reputation of the journal in which they are published.

*Journal launched in 2022.