Many commercial and non-commercial initiatives regarding electronic journals have started in the last decade. They are, however/so widespread and ad hoc that a complete overview of all online journals is not possible. This paper offers a brief description of the current state of affairs concerning electronic journals from and about Africa and highlights some of the trends.

Paper journals have existed since 1665 when the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society appeared in London and Le Journal des Scavans in Paris. A hundred years later more than ten scientific journals were available, mostly published by learned societies in Europe. And by 1850, there were well over a thousand journals with articles specialising in all different scientific fields from ethnology to medicine and geology to philosophy. By 1980 there were well over 180,000 different scientific journals.