2020 has been an exceptionally challenging year for all of us. The outbreak of the novel corona virus (COVID-19) pandemic affected every individual and enterprise in this country and worldwide. While the degree of impact may vary from industry to industry, the pandemic requires every business to build resilience while, at the same time, transforming to perform well in the “new normal”.

From an AOSIS perspective, we have been agile in our approach, firstly to support our clients, and secondly to ensure our business is resilient. We are now looking beyond resilience to what lies ahead and how we can reframe the new normal beyond the pandemic.

I would like to thank our clients and stakeholders working with us during these testing times. I am proud to say that AOSIS is still performing optimally and delivering high-quality service to our clients. One of our significant achievements recently was our ability to adapt to the changes in our work environment, meet our clients’ expectations, stabilise and strengthen our existing client relationships, define and institutionalise operational processes and start conversations with prospective clients.

I want to remind and ensure our clients and stakeholders that AOSIS is still one of the most respected publishers in the scholarly publishing industry. All of our publications are open access, listed in leading international indexes and are peer-reviewed; all factors that contribute to our exceptional service.

Since opening our doors in 1999, we have published 50 scholarly books with full inclusion into the Book Citation Index of the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science, and Scopus also approved AOSIS for indexing of our scholarly books. All our books comply with the guidelines of the “Best Practice for Peer Review of Scholarly Books” of the National Scholarly Book Publishers Forum.

All of our 46 published scholarly journals follow a double-blind peer-review process. We also apply professional plagiarism detection and prevention technology to ensure the originality of written work before publication. We support article linking through DOIs, provided by CrossRef. AOSIS is also a member of and subscribes to the standards and code of practice of several leading organisations in the industry, such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.

We recognise that we, as leaders in our field, need to strive to excellence continuously, and we achieve this through the implementation of our four core company values in everything we do:

PASSION – INTEGRITY – FAIRNESS – SERVANT LEADERSHIP

AOSIS is and will always be committed to delivering service of the highest quality and aspiring to be a world-class service provider. We trust that our relationship with you and all our clients will only continue to grow stronger during these unprecedented times.

Warm regards

Dr. Pierre de Villiers

Managing Director