Federation of Pan African Physics Societies (FPAPS)
This African Physical Society is endeavoring to create a Federation of Pan African Physics Societies (FPAPS) consisting of
- African Association of Physics Students (AAPS)
- African Physics Teachers Association (APTA)
- African Astronomical Society (AfAS)
- African Biophysics Society (AfBS)
- African Crystallographic Association (AfCA)
- African Geophysical Society (AfGS)
- African Materials Research Society (AMRS)
- African Optics and Photonics Society (AOPS)
- African Physical Society (AfPS)
- African Seismological Commission (ASC)
- Federation of African Medical Physics Organizations (FAMPO)
- Associação Nacional de Estudantes de Física Afrodescendentes (ANFADE) (a Brazilian organization)
- CARICOM Physics (Physics in the Caribbean Community)
The raisons d’etre for FPAPS follow from the history of the American Institute of Physics, the Association of Asia Pacific Physical Societies, the European Physical Society. That is, we would achieve certain economies of scale in basic administrative functions, publications production, conference planning and execution, marketing and membership management, member services, educational programs, and policy advocacy.
1. Interlocuting with similar organizations in the Americas, Asia, and Europe.
2. Following the benefits articulated in this 2008 article by Gretchen Smith, Mapping Social Networks among Crystallographers in South Africa, it is possible to build an online professional community of practice where all our African sister societies can have their own customized portal, but the community is all one big common database. So all the colleagues across organizations can do all the social networking things across organizations. Tools can be built in that are relevant specifically to researchers, e.g., cv pages and bibliographies with scientometric tools. Think of it as a private and customized Facebook with social networking tools specifically customized for scientific researchers.
3. An FPAPS publications office would help produce more editors, articles, and special issues for scholarly journals and newsletters, e.g., The African Review of Physics, Waves and Packets, and The African Physics Newsletter.
It is also possible to create a collection of bibliometric and scientometric websites that display data on the published work of Africans in physics, astronomy, geophysics, materials science, etc. That is, we can get a meta-data output file from the SCOPUS database of papers where at least one author lists an African address, or we can query for specific people, i.e., known astronomy/astrophysics researchers in Africa and members of whatever Society. That output file, which would include links to the actual paper via the DOI, can be used as input for a platform like TIVO. The result would be a compendium of the published work of African researchers in physics and astronomy whereby researchers around the world can identify potential African collaborators and vice versa.
4. FAPS is a way to organize colleagues around the design and location specification of multi-user, multi-purpose facilities, e.g., an African light source, or an African supercomputing center.
5. It could be an advocacy force at the AU, regional communities, and national governments for investments in physics, astronomy, and cognate fields.