Cairn.info is strengthening its strategy to integrate and promote French-language scientific publications from the Global South

A shared ambition for Francophone research

In a global context characterised by fierce competition from major players in scientific publishing, Cairn.info is affirming a strategic ambition to raise the international profile of Francophone research. This initiative aims to gradually integrate high-quality scientific publications from the Global South, particularly from the African continent, with the dual objective of enhancing the presence and discoverability of journals and authors from these regions, whilst maintaining the level of selectivity and quality that underpins the value of indexing on Cairn.info for its readership.

A rapidly expanding partnership ecosystem

To implement this integration policy, Cairn.info relies on several complementary partnerships:

• Al-fikr, a Tunisian platform for electronic scientific resources, which handles the structuring of metadata and provides editorial support for the publications featured;

• The CNRST (National Centre for Scientific and Technical Research), whose collaboration includes a component dedicated to indexing journals from the Portal of Moroccan Scientific Journals (PRSM);

• L’Harmattan, which brings together a network of publishing houses based in around ten sub-Saharan African countries, providing access, via Cairn.info, to over 10,000 books and a growing number of journals;

• African Books Collective, a publishing consortium that will provide access to some 2,500 books and several journals from English-language publishers across the African continent;

• Elsevier, through a pilot project to jointly develop a prototype for the bibliometric evaluation of Moroccan publications, with the aim of eventually extending this to the entire African continent.

A progressive editorial integration 

To combine international openness with high quality standards, Cairn.info has defined a structured framework for integrating the targeted publications, divided into three categories:

• Journals distributed by partner platforms, but whose characteristics do not yet meet the criteria required for inclusion on Cairn.info;
• Journals that meet these quantitative criteria and benefit from an initial level of visibility on Cairn.info, accessible to institutions across the African continent and the Middle East that subscribe to the platform;
• Journals selected annually for distribution to all Cairn.info users, based on an in-depth bibliometric analysis, drawing on tools developed in partnership with Elsevier (traffic, citations, author data, etc.). An initial analysis session is scheduled for autumn 2026, with integration taking place on 1 January 2027.

Through this policy, Cairn.info aims to make Francophone research, in all its diversity, an essential component of global scientific dissemination, by giving publications from the Global South the means to reach far beyond their local contexts.