ISSN

not available (PRINT)
3079-7942 (ONLINE)

Focus and scope

The African Journal of Sustainable Tourism (AJST) aims to make a constructive contribution to the achievement of sustainable tourism on the African continent through the provision of impactful, peer-reviewed articles. AJST strives to publish both conceptual and empirical papers and its focus is aligned to the following areas:

• Corporate social responsibility in the tourism industry
• Responsible tourism practices
• Community-based natural resource management and tourism
• Well-being of host communities
• Service quality and customer relationship management to enhance sustainability of business and entrepreneurial practice
• Capturing the economic benefits of tourism
• Protection of natural assets and the management of scarce natural resources.
• Ethical visitor management
• Innovative pedagogies to promote sustainable tourism education.

AJST promotes research within the discipline of tourism that promotes the sustainability of the industry, the community of tourism stakeholders, and the environment in which tourism activities take place. It serves as a platform for the collation, review, and dissemination of quality research that will contribute to the body of knowledge of tourism in order to enhance the sustainability of the industry.

Publications in this journal should be useful to the contribution of new understanding and insights into the complex realm of sustainable tourism.  AJST seeks to publish research that contributes to the theoretical and applied discourse into the management of sustainable tourism in Africa in relation to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.  Although the journal does not exclude submissions from outside the region, the contribution of the publications should be manifested to the continent. Submissions that do not exhibit a beneficial contribution to the region and that do not contribute to the development of new knowledge and theory will not be considered.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

The journal, in terms of its focus and scope, and, by extension, by the articles that are published in it, aims to contribute to the following SDGs through some specific focus areas:

• Goal 1 – End poverty in all its forms everywhere: corporate social responsibility in the tourism industry; community-based natural resource management and tourism; and well-being of host communities.
• Goal 3 – Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages: well-being of host communities.
• Goal 4 – Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all: innovative pedagogies to promote sustainable tourism education.
• Goal 5 – Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls: ethical visitor management that empowers women and marginalised groups such as people with disabilities, the LGBTQIA+ community and others.
• Goal 8 – Promote sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all: corporate social responsibility in the tourism industry; responsible tourism practices; community-based natural resource management and tourism; well-being of host communities; and capturing the economic benefits of tourism.
• Goal 9 – Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation: corporate social responsibility in the tourism industry; responsible tourism practices; community-based natural resource management and tourism; and well-being of host communities
• Goal 10 – Reduce inequality within and among countries: well-being of host communities.
• Goal 11 – Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable: well-being of host communities; and visitor safety and security.
• Goal 12 – Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns: responsible tourism practices; and ethical visitor management of visitor behaviour.
• Goal 13 – Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts: corporate social responsibility in the tourism industry; responsible tourism practices; and protection of natural assets and the management of scarce natural resources.
• Goal 14 – Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas, and marine resources for sustainable development: protection of natural assets and the management of scarce natural resources
• Goal 15 – Protect, restore, and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss: protection of natural assets and the management of scarce natural resources; and ethical tourism development and management in sensitive environments.
• Goal 16 – Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions at all levels: corporate social responsibility in the tourism industry; responsible tourism practices; community-based natural resource management and tourism; and well-being of host communities.
• Goal 17 – Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development: corporate social responsibility in the tourism industry.

Additionally, the focus area ‘Service quality and customer relationship management to enhance sustainability of business and entrepreneurial practice’ does not align directly to the 17 SDGs listed above.  However, as tourism is a primarily a private sector driven industry, the commercial operations of these organisations should also be managed in an economic sustainable way.

Historic data

The importance of the tourism industry for the promotion of economic development, environmental conservation and social upliftment is highly relevant for regions and countries in Africa. The tourism industry is a multi-disciplinary industry and, as such, publications in the field are predominantly published in journals related to business management, marketing, event management or recreation. This is especially true for journals based in Africa. A need was realised for a journal that published high-quality research articles in the field of tourism by Africans and for Africans that will promote the achievement of the United Nations SDGs on the continent. 

Publication frequency

The journal publishes one issue each year. Articles are published online when ready for publication and then printed in an end-of-year compilation. Additional issues 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 the 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.

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
• 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://ajstjournal.org/index.php/ajst/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.