Editor's Introduction: A Journal for Everyone

When you open this second issue of 2019 of the African Studies Review, or, as increasing numbers of our membership do, view it online, we hope that you will notice some exciting new features. Over the past few months changes have been accelerating, and we have launched a number of new accessibility enhancements, some of which have been months in the planning. Our overarching goal is to deliver a journal accessible to as many people as possible in African studies regardless of means, employment, or geographical location.

Two of the most important new enhancements are designed to include our francophone and lusophone colleagues. In consultation with our readers and our Editorial Review Board, we now have tri-lingual abstracts: English, French, and now Portuguese. Most of the articles in this issue, several from the previous issue, and all forthcoming articles now feature the additional enrichment of a Portuguese abstract. We encourage you to share with your colleagues and peers, and particularly with scholars working and living in Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, Angola, and Mozambique. For some time now, all ASA members should have been receiving an electronic table of contents (ETOC) by email when a new issue is released. We have also begun digitally circulating the Table of Contents complete with abstracts, in both French and Portuguese. Look out for these on H-Africa [https://networks.h-net.org/h-africa] and on other platforms; please share, and share widely.

A second major development is the launch of our new French "toggle" (see Figure 1). Look up to the top right corner of our main webpage [https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/african-studies-review], and you will see English | Français. With this addition, you can switch between English and French! This functionality embedded into the Cambridge Core online journal platform enables francophone scholars to view much of the journal platform and all the headings in French. The goal here for us at the ASR is, again, greater accessibility. We want you, our francophone colleagues and members, to be able to search and find articles and reviews that interest you. We also want you to be able to submit articles in French and navigate the submission portal—ScholarOne—entirely in French. Did you know that we are now accepting articles in French? We are now officially a bilingual journal. The full capabilities of functionality will be rolling out over several months because of the generous investment of our publisher, Cambridge University Press. Please, again, share this news widely.

Figure 1.

Users may now switch their interface with ScholarOne to French.

Enhancing accessibility is a key to the decolonization of knowledge production and dissemination, and that is why this issue is also a celebration. We are pleased to announce that our first group of digital access awardees received their notifications in April. You might recall that last year we launched a new program designed to increase the involvement of Africa-based scholars in the activities of the journal, particularly in reviewing articles and reviewing new publications. We are committed to playing an active role in dissolving the North-South resource/access/technology divide. With the support of our publisher, we have been able to award a six-month unlimited access pass to certain African studies journals as an incentive for first-time reviewers based on the African continent. Recently, the first twenty awardees [based in Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Senegal, and elsewhere] were provided with access keys. Armed with this, our peers can read and download as many articles as they desire. We hope our first cohort of awardees find this a rewarding experience, and we look forward to expanding the program. Please alert your peers!

The third major new improvement to the ASR is that we can now permanently host digital audio and video files to accompany and enhance the scholarly impact of articles we publish. Last issue we trialed this functionality with Joseph Hellweg's fascinating article [https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2018.142] about the hunting songs of the majority-Muslim Odienné region...