Created in January 2010 by a multidisciplinary team of African and European Sociologists, Anthropologists, Doctors, Pharmacists, Psychologists and Psychoanalysts, the RASP is a Pan-African open access journal. It aims to create a fund of documentation useful to students, teachers, policy makers and researchers who find support for dissemination of their work in French or English.

RASP is an open access journal, which means all its 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 as long as they cite the source. Since January 2018, the RASP has been published by Bamako Institute for Research and Development Studies Press.