About the Journal

Focus and Scope

The Journal of Student Affairs in Africa (JSAA) considers theoretical, practice-relevant, and reflective contributions from across the scholarly field of Student Development and professional domains of Student Development/Student Affairs, taking due cognizance that the scope is broad, fluid and context dependent.

The scope of JSAA is indicated by keywords such as: student affairs, student career development, student counselling, student development theory and research, student discipline, student engagement, student experience, student finances and financial aid, student housing, disability/disabled students, student leadership and governance, student life cycle, student living and learning, student movement, student organisations, student orientation, student policy, student politics and activism, student sport, student support, academic development (and its intersection with the student affairs co-curriculum), graduate attributes, and teaching and learning support. This list of keywords is not exhaustive. Our key focus area is the core functions of student affairs and services in Africa.

Publication Frequency

JSAA is published twice a year by the JSAA Editors in collaboration with the University of Pretoria and the open access, non-profit, public benefit academic publisher African Minds.

Open Access Policy

The Journal of Student Affairs in Africa 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, as underwritten by the license Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author.

Publication Ethics and Publication

The editorial and peer review policy of JSAA adheres to the Code of Best Practice in Scholarly Journal Publishing, Editing and Peer Review (Academy of Sciences of SA Council/ASSAf, 2018).

Information on the Editorial Executive and International Editorial Advisory Board, Authors Guidelines, Peer Review Policy and Process, Copyright and Access, Archiving, Ownership and Management of the Journal and related Journal Information are all available on this website.

For any further information or clarification, please contact the journal administrator Ms Bronwin Sebonka at bs.sebonka@up.ac.za. 

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The Journal of Student Affairs in Africa is indexed and co-hosted by African Journals Online (AJOL). AJOL is the world's largest and pre-eminent collection of peer-reviewed, African-published scholarly journals. See http://www.ajol.info/index.php/jssa

SA-accredited journal

Since 2017, JSAA is a fully accredited scholarly journal listed in the South African list of journals maintained by the Department of Higher Education and Training. This means that all peer reviewed articles (i.e. research articles and reflective practice articles) published in Vol. 5 and following by South Africa-based researchers qualify for national research output subsidy in line with the South African Higher Education Funding Framework.

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

The Journal of Student Affairs in Africa is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. According to DOAJ (2015, website): "The aim of the DOAJ is to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals, thereby promoting their increased usage and impact. The DOAJ aims to be comprehensive and cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control system to guarantee the content. In short, the DOAJ aims to be the one-stop shop for users of open access journals.

Definitions

Open Access Journal: We define open access journals as journals that use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access. From the BOAI definition of "open access", we support the rights of users to "read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles" as mandatory for a journal to be included in the directory.

Quality Control System: The journal must exercise peer-review or editorial review (particularly in the Humanities), led by an editor, or an editor and an editorial board.

Research Journal: Journals that report primary results of research or overviews of research results to a scholarly community.

Periodical: A serial appearing, or intending to appear, indefinitely at regular intervals and generally more frequently than annually, each issue of which is numbered or dated consecutively and normally contains separate articles, stories, or other writings.

Author Fees

JSAA is a diamond open access journal. Authors publish free of charge; there are no compulsory processing charges or page fees. Please register for alerts about new issues and opportunities.

Digital Preservation

JSAA is independently co-hosted on multiple servers including AJOL, DOAJ, ERIC, and the PKP platform of the University of Pretoria.  

ORCID 

This version of PKP journal platform can unfortunately not read the ORCID iD.  Please do not add it when you register or when submitting a paper. 

After registration, can you edit your profile and then insert the ORCID, or please send your ORCiD, along with your name and the name of the journal to heather.thuynsma[at]up.ac.za to add to your Profile.

ORCID iD is a persistent, unique, numeric identifier for individual researchers and creators. It distinguishes you from researchers and creators with the same or similar names.  ORCID iD is similar to ResearcherID, Scopus Author ID, ISNI and other systems for identifying and distinguishing researchers and creators.

JSAA History

JSAA was originally founded at the University of the Western Cape in 2012 with support from African Minds publisher. It started publishing in 2013 and has continued to publish two issues per annum every year. In 2017, JSAA moved to Stellenbosch University with publishing services provided by SUN Media. Since 2022, JSAA is a journal supported by the University of Pretoria, ESI Press as well as African Minds.

Over the years, JSAA has consistently been recognised as a high-quality academic and scholarly journal building a knowledge base on Student Affairs in Africa. The quality of the journal is externally evaluated regularly by the Academy of Sciences of South Africa (ASSAf) which recommended in 2017 its accreditation as bona fide academic journal to the South African Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) and included JSAA in 2023 in its flagship indexing service, SciELO. 

The founding Editorial Executive of JSAA include: Prof. Teboho Moja, Dr Birgit Schreiber, Prof. Thierry Luescher, Dr Martin Mandew, Prof. Gerald Wangenge-Ouma, and Distinguished Prof. John Schuh. The founding of the Journal was supported by Ms Tonia Overmeyer. African Minds publisher supported the journal as 'incubator' during its early years.