The status and future of the African journal
Abstract:
This chapter describes the current environment for African-published journals across the large and diverse continent. It finds that many journals struggle for visibility amid the highly professionalized journals environment elsewhere in the world. Equally, many of the African journals are poorly funded or are supported by their parent organization, and this has led to a weak environment for indigenous research publishing. Against this background, the chapter describes the increase in initiatives to support indigenous publishing and increase the visibility of research undertaken in the 55 diverse countries. Recent changes have included a large increase in the number of repositories and support for authoring and editorial skills. These recent changes, including improved access to the Internet, are dramatically changing the quality of articles and journals although there still remain questions over financial and operational sustainability in this fragile environment.
History
Although several countries in Africa can trace an ancient tradition of higher education, these traditional centres of higher learning have mostly disappeared, some destroyed by colonialism. Today, the continent’s tertiary education is dominated by academic institutions copied directly from the European university model, and the state of the African journal is intrinsically related to the state of the African university.
Most South African universities were established prior to the Second World War, resulting in a comparatively long history of scholarly communication. The first African journals were launched in the late nineteenth century with the South African Medical Journal and the South African Law Journal, both in 1884. By contrast, most universities in the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa were established after those countries’ independence from colonial occupation, starting in the 1950s. In line with that, as within Europe, the majority of journals started publishing in the 1960s and 1970s at a time when the newly independent African countries were optimistically increasing their foothold on the world with increased funding of tertiary education and economic growth. Journals represented a means of promoting their intellectual development and provided a vehicle whereby their academia could implement the ‘publish or perish’ accreditation used in the industrialized countries. Many university faculties and associations launched their own titles as a means of capturing their research and providing recognition for their institutions.
However, the support for higher education in most of the continent was very short-lived, and journal publishing in Africa suffered disproportionately from the global recession and crisis in higher education in the 1970s and 1980s, with the IMF/World Bank-imposed structural adjustment programmes in Africa worsening the situation. A very influential World Bank policy that higher education was unimportant for developing countries only ended in 2000, and resulted in a significant reduction in international support for higher education in Africa. It also resulted in African governments reducing public funding for, and emphasis on, the importance of higher education and its related research and communication (Bloom et al., 2006). Consequently, after decades of neglect, African universities (and the journals published in association with them) now function in extremely difficult circumstances, usually characterized by severe resource scarcity to the extent that ‘the budgets of individual universities in many industrialized countries exceed the entire national budgets for higher education in many African nations’ (Teferra and Altbach, 2004). Capitulating to the view that tertiary education and research were not important for their countries’ economic development, thus allowing the long disintegration of universities, is arguably the worst error of postcolonial leadership in Africa. It is increasingly recognized that ‘it will be extremely difficult – perhaps even impossible – for Africa to compete effectively in a world increasingly dominated by knowledge and information unless it consciously, persistently, and vigorously overhauls its potential and its most crucial institutions: its universities’ (ibid.). An important element of this is the corresponding transformation needed in scholarly communication on the African continent.
Journal statistics
There are no comprehensive facts about the journal publishing market in Africa as a whole although some countries do maintain records. In South Africa, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) recognize about 450 titles, of which they accredit 230. From the numbers indexed in African Journals OnLine (AJOL) (http://www.ajol.info), and from other information from around the continent, we estimate that in Sub-Saharan Africa there are probably about 2000 titles in total, of which Nigeria and South Africa hold the largest number – about 450 each (see Table 17.1). The majority are published in English, with French and Afrikaans being the next most predominant languages.
Table 17.1
Sub-Saharan African titles indexed in international directories
| Web of Science | MEDLINE | AJOL | |
| Ghana | 0 | 0 | 19 |
| Kenya | 3 | 2 | 24 |
| Nigeria | 12 | 8 | 180 |
| South Africa | 69 | 10 | 751 |
| Tanzania | 0 | 2 | 16 |
| Uganda | 1 | 1 | 11 |
| Other Sub-Saharan Africa | 3 | 13 | 74 |
| Total | 88 | 36 | 399 |
1South Africa has comparatively well-developed and well-resourced public and commercial online journal aggregators, and online presence of individual journals and institutional repositories. AJOL concentrates efforts on journals publishing from countries which do not have that kind of support infrastructure. Journals from South Africa are consequently under-represented on AJOL.
As there are very few research institutions in Africa outside of universities, the majority of journals are published in the university context, mostly by departments or faculties, and some by societies and associations. Given the relationship between universities and journals in Africa, the fact that there are only around 700 universities on the continent is a limiting factor to journal numbers.
The number of research papers published from Africa is usually underestimated, due to historical exclusion from the indexes of developed country origin that are usually used to determine the number. South Africa is the most productive country within the African continent, and analysis of the South African knowledge base at the University of Stellenbosch shows that about 7000 articles are published with one or more South African author each year. Of these, about 3500 are published within journals indexed by the Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge, leaving a further 3500 published within non-indexed titles (ASSAf, 2006).
The current publishing environment within Africa
Africa is a vast continent containing 55 countries with widely varying contexts; but there are areas of commonality within the enormous diversity. Northern African higher education is considerably different from that in the rest of the continent (Teferra and Altbach, 2004), while South Africa has a unique history that has shaped a context distinct from the rest of the region. South Africa is better resourced than most of the rest of the continent, with a well-developed ICT infrastructure accessible to researchers and students at the tertiary level, which is not usually the case elsewhere. Unless otherwise stated, comments about African journal publishing in this chapter refer mainly to Sub-Saharan Africa, excluding South Africa. The intention is not to reinforce mythical, colonial or artificial divisions, but simply to reflect the real regional differences in higher education systems and scholarly communications.
With some successful exceptions, the general state of research and research infrastructure in Africa is poor, as is the corresponding infrastructure to communicate the outcomes of the research. Despite the fact that publishing research is a vital element used by African universities to evaluate their academic staff for promotion, and recognized as being a universal assessment tool of the institutions themselves, most African universities’ systems to support research publishing have been and are weak, and university administrators have shown a lack of commitment to and appreciation of journal production (ibid.). The small number of researchers who strive to continue regular journal publishing are doing a truly heroic job, over and above their full-time employment, often with little experience, and always little to no funding, working in the context of unreliable electricity supply, slow and intermittent Internet access, a shortage of publishable material, and frequently working in the absence of university support structures and acknowledgement. Given the current challenges, and historical obstacles, it is remarkable, and a testament to the commitment and dedication of these African researchers, that the few thousand Sub-Saharan African journals that do exist continue to publish as well as they do.
One important difference in the history of journal publishing in Africa compared with that within Europe and America is in the involvement of commercial publishers. Unlike the developed countries, there were (and continue to be) few links between journals and professional publishers, and this has had a tremendous impact on the growth and success of the African journal industry.
There are relatively few publishers within Africa as books are an expensive luxury, and the market is small (UNESCO, 2004). Although Africa has around 15 per cent of the world’s population, it only produces around 2 per cent of the world’s books. Part of the reason for this is that there is a greater oral tradition than literary tradition within the continent and literacy in most African countries is low, ranging from 23.9 per cent (Burkina Faso) to 88.7 per cent (Zimbabwe) – compared with an average of 79.9 per cent for the rest of the world. Enrolment in tertiary education ranges from 0.4 per cent (Guinea-Bissau) to 15.2 per cent (South Africa) compared with 22.9 per cent as the world average, which further impacts on the market for textbooks and related higher-level information literature.
As textbooks represent the main market for publications in Africa, this is where African publishers tend to focus their output (approximately 95 per cent of their total output, according to Stringer [2002]). Throughout the continent the book industry is dominated by multinational publishers such as Macmillan and Longman (Pearson), who are the dominant publishers in certain countries such as Namibia and Botswana. Their impact is both positive and negative as their profits are not retained within the countries but they are able to take more economic risks than a smaller local publisher, and therefore are able to supply a greater choice of publications (Chakava, 2007). Perhaps the most detrimental international influences are the well-intentioned donation programmes which provide free books. For example, CTA (http://www.cta.int), an EU-funded organization based in the Netherlands, runs a book service whereby individuals and organizations can apply for vouchers to ‘purchase’ books from them. During 2010 they distributed almost 170,000 books to countries within Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (CTA online annual report: http://annualreport2010.cta.int/en/pdf/tab_DPID_EN.pdf). Although this is a wonderful service it undermines local publishers, making it increasingly difficult to build a business when the consumers expect books for free.
Exacerbating these external influences, there are problems in making sales between countries within the continent. There are some ‘common market’ agreements in East and West Africa, but these do not resolve all the problems of transferring money from one country to another, and this limits distribution. Publishers frequently have European bank accounts as it is easier to transfer to these than to an account in another African country. This economic limitation results in publishers being unable to develop into areas where the local market is too small to sustain a publication. Research-level publications (including journals) have a small and poorly-funded audience, and therefore do not represent a viable business for the majority of publishers. However, there are of course exceptions, such as NISC in South Africa (http://www.nisc.co.za/journals) which publishes 13 journals (one of which is open access) on behalf of societies and scientific associations. Professional, commercial open access publishing houses are also beginning to emerge on the continent. AOSIS OpenJournals in South Africa (http://www.openjournals.net), discussed further below, publishes 15 online-first, open access titles. The somewhat contentious Academic Journals is an open access publisher based in Nigeria and Kenya (http://www.academicjournals.org/journals.htm) with a stable of 110 open access titles, according to their website. Some of these titles were taken over from their previous publishers and are undoubtedly long-standing, high-quality journals, but Academic Journals has been criticized for its rapid ‘mushrooming’ of new journals in which little content is published, and for aggressive email tactics to elicit paper submissions and find peer reviewers. The respected Council for the Development of Social Science Research (CODESRIA) in Senegal successfully publishes 11 journals, having converted to open access as a publishing model some years ago, but their approach appears to be more that of a non-profit publisher than a commercial publisher.
University presses
In an attempt to improve the availability of locally produced publications for the university and research market, efforts have been made to develop university presses to serve this need. Unfortunately, in most cases they have been unsuccessful; this is due to a variety of reasons, the main one being a lack of funding. It was assumed that they would operate with a commercial model, whereby they would make a profit for their institution and not require funding. Unfortunately, as many university presses have found, it is not possible for the majority of them to be self-sustaining and funding is required – funding which is not forthcoming in many African situations. In Kenya, Nairobi University Press was established in 1984 but by 2000 it had published only 40 titles due to poor funding; similarly, in Uganda, Makerere University Press was established in 1979 but by 2000 had published only 12 titles (Chakava, 2007).
In Ethiopia, Addis Ababa University Press is run with only one administrative member of staff, assisted by volunteers from the university and managed by a member of faculty seconded for a three-year term (Wole and Habte, 2007). Although they have formed some useful publishing partnerships in the past, they, in common with other university and academic publishers, focus their attention on the content quality of publications rather than the publishing function. This means that they have not been able to distribute their publications widely, and they lack a sustainable economic model for most of their books. Many authors subsidize the publication of their titles – a situation not uncommon in many African university presses.
The poor funding (and poor working practices) of many university presses has made them unsuitable to support the journals published within their institutions, and they rarely become involved in providing publishing services for them. Some journals use their printing facilities as they would an external supplier; however, this is often more expensive than using other local presses, and sometimes the quality is poorer. Although there may be potential to develop university presses as centres of publishing skill for the benefit of their institution, the problems of funding and operational structure make them a difficult resource to develop.
Journals, publishers and money
Without the support of a professional publisher – or the university press – many journals are effectively ‘self-published’ and rely on the editor, with perhaps an assistant, to operate all functions required to produce the journal. In addition, they are frequently unable to introduce any innovative changes as strategic decisions need to be approved by a (frequently large) committee of the parent association or faculty. Not surprisingly, the result of this is a conservative approach to publishing and a focus on the editorial content of the journal, rather than the publishing activities. In addition, poor funding means that once the effectively ‘free’ work has been done (e.g., the editorial review and selection) many issues have to wait until cash becomes available for typesetting, printing and distribution. This is often a lower priority than the editorial work, and so publication of an issue can take months (and, in some cases, years).
Occasionally, African journals which do manage to excel and attain comparable standards to those published in developed countries are taken over by large commercial publishers from Europe or the US, thus weakening the extended system of scholarly communication in the country or region of origin, and favouring that of the developed country. One such example is the South African Journal of Botany which was taken over by Elsevier in 2006. An alternative, more appropriate model – taken by some journals which do wish to be involved with commercial publishers from elsewhere in the world – is that offered by Routledge/ Taylor & Francis, whose approach is to work in partnership with journals through co-publishing agreements that help to further strengthen the journals but do not remove them entirely from the local scholarly publishing system.
AJOL has found that almost 70 per cent of the more than 400 journals hosted on its website publish on a regular basis, remaining close to their intended publication frequencies. However, the rest do not always publish regularly – usually as a result of funding and copy-flow problems. There is sometimes a lack of understanding of how detrimental this can be to the journal and a lack of impetus to avoid delays. This intermittency has led to the failure of several support initiatives, one of the most notable being the incorporation of selected journals within Project MUSE. Supported by both the (now defunct) University of Michigan African ejournals project and the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP), several journals were accepted to join Project MUSE (a sales collection of online journals). Unfortunately, with the exception of one title, the journals were all removed from this initiative due to irregular publication, which made it impossible for MUSE to fulfil its obligations to subscribers.
Sadly, online publishing does not necessarily improve problems with the timeliness and smooth functioning of journals. For example, the monthly East African Medical Journal (EAMJ), one of the most prestigious (and oldest – it started in 1923) journals within the continent, appears to be publishing 18 months behind schedule, which must cause authors and subscribers to doubt its health. However, given that print publication is accorded higher priority than online publication by some journals, an apparent delay may be because the journals have not yet put their recently published content online. In the case of the EAMJ, the lag between publication and the addition of the electronic version to its own website and AJOL has been worsened by other factors which led to a complete overhaul of the publication during 2011. Unfortunately, during transitions of editors and journal staff, much is not, or cannot, be handed over, and journals often struggle to regain their former functionality after transitions of key personnel. Often the new incumbents have different contact details and lose past associations. Again using the EAMJ as an example, the new people now running the journal were not aware of the publication’s long-standing partnership with AJOL until AJOL actively sought out contact with the journal through new channels. This has an impact not only on the perception of the journal but also on the likelihood of obtaining subscription revenue in the future. Among other areas for improvement, the new team has recognized the need for increased attention to be paid to the online aspects of the publication, notably working towards introducing online manuscript submissions and payment systems.
For those journals which successfully embrace the full gamut of new tools and approaches offered by the Internet and ICTs, things appears to be very much in their favour. A superb example of this is the Pan African Medical Journal (PAMJ) (http://www.panafrican-med-journal.com/) which started quite recently in 2009 as a born-digital, open access journal with the stated aim of being the leading medical journal in Africa and one of the best in the world, and the vision of ‘better health through knowledge sharing and information dissemination’. The founding editor had experienced the pressure for health researchers working in Africa both to publish their research in high-profile, respected journals and, at the same time, to conduct research relevant to regionally-specific health issues often not of interest to the high-profile health journals of Europe and North America. This is one of the strongest and most critical reasons for an ongoing and functional research publishing system and culture to be fostered and supported in African countries and on the continent in the long term. Since January 2009, the PAMJ has been indexed in the African Index Medicus (AIM), AJOL, EBSCO, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Embase, Scopus, CABI and PubMed Central/ PubMed. With a rapidly growing number of manuscript submissions, the PAMJ is probably the fastest-growing journal on the continent, as well as having quickly achieved an international reputation as a high-quality, prestigious publication. Of course, this success is not solely due to the PAMJ having made the most of the technological tools at its disposal, but is also due to its driven, committed, hard-working, skilled and proactive team.
Online publishing is certainly an opportunity from which many journals are benefiting – particularly from initiatives to freely host or index journals. There is a huge amount of interest from African journals in publishing online, but there are also several concerns. Primarily, funding is an issue, both in implementing online publishing and also in ensuring that it does not reduce their precious revenues. Lack of knowledge about online publishing is preventing many journals from going online, and others have extremely poorly-constructed websites, often embedded within their institution’s site and not discoverable through the major search engines. Inevitably, this means that full advantage of what online publishing can offer is not yet realized. Online editions are frequently published after the print version – even when the print version has been halted due to lack of funds.
Without professional publishing input into the operation, journals suffer from a lack of development in online systems, in sales (and income) development, in indexing and in technological improvements to their operation (e.g., online submission systems). Equally, the journals operate in isolation, without the benefit of experience from other journals and publishers. Of course there are sophisticated, well-established titles that operate in an extremely professional and successful manner, but these – unfortunately – are in the minority.
Distribution
Many journals do not distribute to a subscriber list. Some are distributed locally, to members of the association or university; many others are distributed to other institutions on a ‘swap’ system – as part of a barter system to obtain other journals for their libraries. This can be a lifeline for some institutions, as several libraries in Sub-Saharan Africa have not subscribed to any journal for years (Arunachalam, 2003) and rely on international programmes of donor support to provide access to research publications for their faculty.
Distribution between African countries is very poor, and increasingly libraries are finding it easier to obtain ‘Western’ publications through initiatives such as Research4Life (http://www.research4life.org/) and Strengthening Research and Knowledge Systems (SRKS – previously called PERI – http://www.inasp.info/work/what-we-do/programmes/srks/) than to obtain access to African-published content. This further disadvantages African-published journals as the librarians make less effort to find and subscribe to them when they can obtain international journals for free. There is a perception that the journals from developed countries are superior to those published within the African continent although there is a recognized need for information that is only available within the African titles – as proven by the amount of use made of the African journal support initiative, AJOL (see below).
Few journals make substantial sales through subscriptions – although the income received from just a few international sales may provide sufficient funding to print the next issue, making them crucially important to the journal’s continued existence. Fluctuations in currency can be a major problem, and some journals have found that the high bank charges associated with processing international payments may be greater than the sale itself (for example in Zimbabwe; Cumming, 2007, personal communication).
Journals, authors and editors
Many journals have poor author services, and this encourages poor author practices. It can take months (or years) to review papers, and communication with authors is poor, with many journal editors neither informing authors of acceptance nor publication. One result of this is that authors frequently submit to more than one journal at a time to gain the fastest possible publication. This can lead to accusations of the author self-plagiarizing, or arguments between publishers about primacy, when the same article is published by two different journals, while the author might not have been aware that it had been published by either one. The combined problems of lack of timeliness and publishing stoppages due to resource issues often result in a lengthy ‘in press’ stage that leaves authors in limbo for an extended period of time.
The situation is – of course – two-way, and journals themselves also suffer at the hands of authors. Several editors report having spent considerable time reviewing and suggesting improvements to an article, only to see the author submit the piece to another title on the basis that it is now more likely to be accepted by the better journal. Equally, few authors follow stylistic guidelines as there is a general perception that it is the editor’s responsibility to edit the paper to the journal’s style.
Online submission technology could greatly assist the communication issues between journals and their authors, and it is slowly being introduced. Unfortunately, it is hampered by the cost of implementing such systems, as they take financial and human resources which many journals do not have (even when the software may be free – as in the case of the Open Journals System from the Canadian-based Public Knowledge Project). The Africa Health Journals Partnership initiative has negotiated free use of the ScholarOne submission system for some members of the Forum for African Medical Editors (FAME) as part of their support for this organization, although take-up has been poor for a variety of reasons. The medical journal arena is an ideal test-bed for this type of software as its authors will have more ready access to the Internet than some other disciplines where such systems may be difficult to introduce – although as access to the Internet is growing fast this situation will change rapidly.
There is a huge need to train future authors, and several initiatives are trying to address this, such as AuthorAID (http://www.authoraid.info) – an initiative to support research authors. AuthorAID is providing some workshop-based training for authors and has established a mechanism of mentoring – linking new authors with experienced authors who can help them to develop their research results into publishable articles. Many of the agencies that support research also run training programmes for their researchers (e.g., the International Foundation for Science) but these are commonly aimed at writing funding proposals rather than at writing up the results of research for publication.
Editorially, the majority of journals have developed similar systems to their Western counterparts. Most operate with an editor-in-chief plus an editorial board, and manage a system of peer review. There are problems in reviewing papers within a small research community where the referees probably know the authors, and bias arising out of respect or disdain is likely to colour the review. Many journal editors will only use referees they know, and are loathe to search indexes to identify specialists in other regions. The reasoning for this is often given as a need to find reviewers with an understanding of local research and the knowledge to identify correctly whether the article is important and novel. In addition, within some African countries, and within some disciplines, there is an expectation of payment by referees, the cost of which may be crippling to a journal and may lead to minimal reviewing. Paying referees is not common within Europe and America, where to peer-review the work of others is considered part of the role of being a researcher and the benefits of early access to research findings is considered an advantage. Within the African context this is not always considered to be sufficient for the effort involved, particularly if the individual is not given time at work to do the reviewing.
Why are journals published?
Given these regional problems it is worth asking the question of why African journals continue to be published and new ones continue to be launched. The reason is the same as for the rest of the world: journals confer prestige on an association or university faculty, and to be published is an important activity on which many academics and researchers build their careers and disseminate the findings of their research.
To be published in an international, well-established journal is, of course, more prestigious than to be published in a domestic, struggling title. However, researchers from Africa face many difficulties in achieving publication in international titles. In the first place, the quality of their research may not be good enough; it may be considered parochial and, although important within their region, of limited interest to academics and researchers elsewhere. Many academics in African countries feel that Western journals are biased against them, and are less likely to publish their articles than those coming out of Europe and America. While many Western editors protest that they do not discriminate in this way, they are likely to decide against papers written by authors who are unable to describe their research for an international audience – perhaps because their first language is not English, or because they have not been trained in writing to a standard demanded by international journals. The reasons for rejection tend to be pragmatic rather than discriminatory, but the result is the same.
This causes a problem for the authors (unable to find a journal in which to publish), and also for other researchers (unable to find relevant research for their locality). The journal African Health Science was launched specifically to address this problem because the editor could find no published research on a prevalent disease in Uganda called ‘nodding syndrome’. He realized that although there was some research on this disease, it was not published in international journals as it was of little interest, and there was no vehicle in which authors could publish their findings (Yamey, 2003).
Although international journals may not publish African research, there is certainly interest from the rest of the world in what is being published within African journals. AJOL, the largest site of African-published journals, hosts the full text of over 400 African-published, peer-reviewed titles, and records visitors from around the world. During 2011, the AJOL website was visited by 1,990,744 unique visitors, a quarter of whom use the AJOL site regularly. There is, of course, great interest in African research from within the continent, as shown by the fact that the majority of AJOL’s regular users are from Africa. Comparing the regular visitors of 2011 to those of 2008 clearly shows a huge increase in the proportion of regular AJOL users from other developing regions in the world (see Table 17.2). While repeat users from Europe doubled during this three-year period, AJOL users from Latin America and South Asia more than quadrupled. Perhaps because of this interest from within the continent and from other developing-country regions, the vast majority of full-text downloads from AJOL are from its 122 open access partner titles, rather than from its 295 subscription-based journals.Often, researchers from developing countries cannot afford to pay the fee charged by AJOL for a full text from a subscription-based journal (whose income, less costs, is sent on to the journal), or they may not have a credit card as credit cards are not prevalent in poorer countries. The already comparatively low number of attempted full-text downloads from subscription journals is further reduced when people only realize they need to pay after clicking on the link, and then abandon the process. During 2011, there were 6.6 million full-text downloads from open access journals on AJOL, and ten times fewer than that number even attempted from subscription-based journals (with a tiny fraction of those continuing to the point of payment), despite the latter comprising 70 per cent of the total number of titles. As mentioned above, inter-country distribution in Africa has been difficult in the past, and services such as AJOL play a vital role in making researchers aware of African papers from elsewhere in the continent, and in making them available.
Table 17.2
Regular AJOL users by continent, 2011
| Continent | Number of repeat users | Percentage of total for 2011 | Percentage increase since 2008 |
| Africa1 | 246,127 | 40 | 296 |
| Asia2 | 191,128 | 31 | 618 |
| Europe | 80,473 | 13 | 205 |
| North America | 46,225 | 8 | 141 |
| Unknown3 | 25,211 | 4 | 2912 |
| Latin America4 | 13,365 | 2 | 415 |
| Oceania | 7,263 | 1 | 395 |
| Total | 609,792 | 100 |
1African use tripled in three years, but repeat users from other developing regions increased even more.
2A very large proportion of this increase is from India.
3IP addresses could not be used to determine the location of these users.
4Another significant increase in repeat usage from a developing region
Within South Africa, the government has endorsed the continuance and development of its indigenous journal publishing industry and has established a programme to support it (ASSAf, 2006). Its rationale is a belief that a healthy, high-quality journal publishing system is beneficial to the country, both in academic and in economic terms. It has highlighted especially the benefits of participation in journal editing as a means of developing the skills to critically analyse published research and to communicate one’s own research effectively. It considers a strong journal publishing industry essential if South Africa is to contribute to the general body of research, and at the same time ensure a local focus and application to its own country’s needs.
African research
Compared with Western countries the level of research within Africa is low, and the sustainability of all journals depends on sufficient research being undertaken to result in enough papers to publish.
Although there is increasing investment in universities, research and development (R&D) spending remains low in both absolute and relative terms – despite a World Bank recommendation that increased numbers of the population should attend further education. In 2005, the total GDP of the Sub-Saharan region was US$375 billion – just over half of the US expenditure on R&D in the same year. Sub-Saharan African countries spend less than 1 per cent of their GDP on R&D, and the majority of this goes into salaries rather than into core research (Oyelaran-Oyeyinka, 2006). The result of this is that there is both a small community of researchers and relatively little research being undertaken that can result in publications. However, the increasing number of students attending universities, and the activity within them, indicate that this is changing.
An indicator of the level of international-quality research can be derived from articles indexed by Thompson Reuters’ Web of Knowledge and the Journal Citation Indexes. Although the number of indexed articles with an African-based author increased by approximately 3 per cent from 1995 to 2005, the overall representation of African authors within the indexes decreased from 0.72 per cent of all articles to 0.59 per cent during the same period (National Science Foundation, 2008). This downward trend shows that although there is a slow increase in the amount of research undertaken on the continent, it is not increasing at the same rate as in the rest of the world. From analysis of the Thomson Reuters indexes the vast majority of internationally-published articles come from just three African countries: Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa. There is some correlation between research output and the GDP of each country, although there is no absolute correlation between a high GDP and output; for example, Tunisia and Malawi have a relatively high article output compared to their GDP, whereas the output from Nigeria is far lower than could be expected from the relatively large size of its economy (Adams et al., 2010).
From bibliographic research it appears that in some countries whole areas of expertise have vanished. However, this may not indicate a lack of research but rather that the type of research undertaken does not lend itself to publication. For example, research into agricultural science appears to have disappeared within Kenya and Côte d’Ivoire in the 1990s. However, there is evidence to suggest that this research moved out of the public universities and institutions and into the hands of private (and international) consultants, whose work was not subsequently published (Waast, 2002).
There is also evidence that greater numbers of African researchers are co-authoring articles with international colleagues (outside Africa). This increase (from approximately 34 per cent to 50 per cent of articles between 1990 and 2004) is encouraging as it indicates increased participation in international science (Adams et al., 2010; Tijssen, 2007). Unsurprisingly, the ability to produce international-quality science is closely linked to the country’s technological development. However, there are some disciplines that are more international in nature (such as the medical sciences), and therefore more likely to obtain funding, international collaboration and greater publication. One outcome of this is that if a country decides to develop into an area that is more locally relevant (e.g., agriculture), then their international publication record will suffer, resulting in a reduced international influence and recognition – and a greater need for local journals to capture the research findings.
The future
Initiatives supporting African journals
There is some support for African journals provided by international development agencies, although the majority of this support is provided as hosting for online journals, without publishing skills and knowledge development.
Bioline International (http://www.bioline.org.br) provides a free service for journals to publish full-text material online and open access. It is managed from Toronto University, with the hosting in Brazil. It freely hosts 54 open access journals from developing countries (20 from Africa). As part of its support it provides some training in producing files for online hosting, although it does not provide support for other publishing skills.
AJOL, already mentioned above, provides a collaborative hosting and document delivery service for over 400 journals from throughout the continent. AOSIS, also already discussed above, provides hosting and development for journals, managing journal websites on behalf of 15 South African journals.
Within South Africa, the investigation into research publishing undertaken by ASSAf in 2008 resulted in the establishment of an online platform for South African journals considered suitable for inclusion by evaluation from ASSAf’s journal quality peer-review panel. The platform, SciELO (http://www.scielo.org.za/), uses the online system developed in Brazil for supporting Latin American journals and at the time of writing there are 40 journals hosted on the site.
Also within South Africa, a project to digitize back-files of selected African titles was initiated by Sabinet in 2008. The project is funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and hosts the full text of over 100 journals, with the vast majority of these being South African titles. As with SciELO, the initiative only includes hosting services.
Several initiatives twin African journals with successful Western journals in the same discipline, the idea being that they can share experiences and benefit each other. The success of these models has been patchy as the experiences of each journal are so different. One of the most successful projects is the African Journal Partnership Project initiated in 2004 by the US National Library of Medicine, the John Fogarty International Center for Advanced Study in the Health Sciences and the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. The project has twinned four of the most prestigious African-published health journals with leading Western journals. It provided financial and practical support for improving journal systems, and has also provided training support for journal staff (Goehl and Flanagin, 2008).
Publishing training workshops are not well-established within Africa, and are run by few organizations. INASP (http://www.inasp.info) provides some publishing workshops covering subjects such as marketing, production, design, online development, business management, etc. AJOL also conducts annual regional workshops for partnering journals to train them in the full process of online publishing software, as well as debating and reinforcing various aspects of best-practice journal publishing.
Most training support that is provided focuses on editorial skills. For example, the HINARI Access to Research Initiative (an initiative to enable access to biomedical and health journals) supports members of the Forum for African Medical Editors through the provision of some workshops and the establishment of guidelines for good editorial practice (http://www.who.int/tdr/publications/training-guideline-publications/fame-guidelines/en/).
A recent initiative is using the Internet to provide distance learning for editors and publishers in all developing countries. The Public Knowledge Project has launched PKP School (http://pkpschool.sfu.ca) which provides free online courses in how to use the PKP journal software, Open Journals System (OJS), and also on how to be an editor and how to write articles for publication. The courses have been sponsored by USAID and INASP, and are aimed at providing the missing editorial training required by editors in developing – particularly African – countries.
Development of journal business models
The majority of journals operate within extremely limited budgets and rely on ‘free’ labour for their production. Journals are often not published on time, and many appear to have stopped publishing when they have temporarily stopped printing or distributing due to a lack of money. Perhaps the worst case of this is the East African Agricultural and Forestry Journal, which ceased regular publishing in 1998. After this time the journal continued to accept papers and assign them to an issue. The situation in 2006 was such that there was an enormous backlog of articles and issues that would have required a huge amount of funding to publish and bring the journal back to regular publishing. At that time, options such as publishing online only could not be developed due to disagreements about the ownership of the journal and the inability of anyone to make a decision about how to move the journal forward. The journal has now started more regular publishing, at least online, backdating issues to the years in which they were scheduled to publish. On the journal website (http://www.eaafj.or.ke) there are issues published up to 2011.
Political instability also causes problems. In Zimbabwe, for example, many good journals temporarily ceased publishing when the editors left the country during the economic crisis. In Nigeria, one of the continent’s most prolific journal-publishing countries, delays in publishing can often be ascribed to the repeated nationwide closure of public universities as a result of academic staff striking for months on end.
Few international initiatives support any kind of business model to enable the journals to grow. The only one to do so is AJOL, which provides the journals with small amounts of revenue from article download sales and is investigating a model to sell site-wide subscriptions. The reason for this lack of financial development is that development agencies feel uncomfortable with commercial models in the area of research communication where the primary focus is on making research readily available worldwide. They promote open access as the way forward for journal publishing and research dissemination.
Open access is a methodology for publishing which has gained a lot of popularity within many Asian and South American countries, where there is a desire to make research readily available and where existing support models allow for conversion to open access online publishing. Unfortunately, within Africa there has not been such a groundswell of change in attitudes nor has there been the public sector financial and policy support for regional open access publishing initiatives. Public sector funding and active support have proved crucial and instrumental in Latin America’s success in this regard. It seems clear that without equivalent, active, regionally coherent and co-operative measures from African governments, the same degree of progress is unlikely. There is also some resistance from the journal editors and publishers to making their content freely available. The reasons for this are not readily apparent as the journals do not have a pre-existing successful commercial model and would benefit greatly from the increased visibility that free online publication would give them. One logical explanation for this difference might be that Africa is, of course, worse off in terms of resources than any other developing region of the world (encompassing 33 of the 49 least developed countries [United Nations, 2011]), which might increase the journals’ risk aversion to a model change when they are already barely clinging to survival in exceedingly difficult circumstances. There is a fear of losing the small but valuable revenues that the journals obtain from international sales and a concern about the additional cost of publishing online without somehow gaining additional or alternative income. Finally, there remains the problem that most journals need to continue to provide costly print versions as this is what their readership requires (due to a lack of Internet access). Therefore, any online development would be of most benefit to users outside Africa and to those in the better-funded African institutions.
Some journals, of course, are publishing online and open access. Nearly one-third of the journals hosted by AJOL are open access, for example, which is a higher proportion of open access to subscription journals than in Europe or North America. Some journals have developed innovative models of online publication. For example, South African Family Practice publishes full-text research articles online and open access, but within the print journal (which is distributed to paid-up members of the association) only the abstracts are printed, along with general news and views. In this way, they have divided the journal into a research communication vehicle (open access and online) and a general medical journal (in print). This has solved their problem of trying to produce a hybrid that brings research information to general practitioners in addition to other types of content such as opinions, news and case studies. In this case, the online development is funded through the membership income which supports the journal publication.
Evaluation of scholarly communication quality and impact
The reliance on indicators of research publication impact that were designed and are run in the West needs to be reconsidered by Africans. The Thomson Reuters Journal Impact Factor is the most prevalent measure of impact; however, this measure only looks at a small subset of published articles, and research from Africa and other developing parts of the world has historically been excluded from it. Despite nominal attempts by Thomson Reuters to be somewhat more representative, the methodology of their index has been to include only a small selection of journals (c.12,000 journals) rather than to be fully inclusive.
The traditional methods of measuring impact have always relied upon using citation information to assess the impact of published – usually journal article – research. There have been discussions about establishing impact-factor indexes for African journals, but the resources and practicality of establishing a system have always prevented any such development.
Perhaps the increasing availability of digital communication provides opportunities for Africans to consider other types of accreditation systems and means of evaluating scholarly output through communication. Whereas the status of the African journal remains perilous, there is a wealth of non-journal research output throughout the continent. This includes blogs, conference proceedings, multimedia recordings of presentations, workshop discussions, lectures, field work, data sets, and online science magazine articles (such as that of SciDev.net and Science in Africa). In addition, government departments and non-profit organizations make relevant research findings more accessible to both researchers and the general public through initiatives such as radio and television shows and mobile phone alerts, all of which are increasingly important in Africa.
Journals or repositories
Given the journal environment worldwide, and a difficult fundraising context, it is unlikely that most African journals will be able to change their financial situation substantially or gain additional funding to support publication unless a much-needed transformation and revitalization of African universities is undertaken by Sub-Saharan governments. Current grants from parent institutions or development agencies are usually only available short term and are quickly cut, so they cannot be relied upon for long-term development. Unfortunately, some journal editors believe that there are untapped funds within Western libraries and development agencies, and that there are sales revenues to pursue. This prevents the development of other, more sustainable, business models, and there is a pressing need to find cheaper and more professional methods of making research communication more effective within Africa (Smart, 2007).
Repositories may be a partial solution, if a way can be found to link the publication of scholarly communication output (not just journal articles) in a repository with academic and research accreditation. However, such a radical departure from international university norms is unlikely to be adopted within the vulnerable African academe as it stands, and ‘journal articles in peer-refereed scholarly or academic journals with good national or international standing still dominate when measuring research output’ (Ocholla, 2011). Without first being published through such vehicles, the contents of institutional repositories would likely be considered of suspect quality by African researchers for some time. There is considerable discussion of repositories throughout Africa, although they have been slow to develop and (as elsewhere) concentrate on capturing theses and dissertations. At the time of writing, there are 92 within the African continent (http://www.opendoar.org), with 28 of these located in South Africa.
Conclusion
Without changes in the universities in which they are largely based, it is hard to envisage any substantial alteration to the way in which the majority of African journals operate. The lack of professional, collective management leads to a fragmented and inherently conservative approach to journal publishing, reinforced by university systems based on the status quo. Journals anywhere in the world are expensive to produce, both in terms of the time required from the academic research community and in the funding required to meet technological challenges and benefit from opportunities. Africa has attempted to work with a journal model based on the commercial Western model, but within an environment in which the required financial support simply has not been available. What is needed desperately is a long-term commitment by African governments to devote a larger percentage of the GDP to higher education and research, and a corresponding long-term commitment from the international development community to offset the effects of the misguided and damaging policies of the previous century through significant and ongoing commitments to support higher education in Africa. As part of the transformation process, university leadership in Africa needs to recognize the importance of research communication and contribute attention and funding to supporting the regional systems already functioning well, in addition to developing alternative norms for research communication and evaluation that work for Africa. Such norms could include finding ways to extend the communication of new African knowledge from formal publications to more widely accessible means that could impact more meaningfully on good governance and development on the continent.
Several authors support a collaborative model for the future of journals and research communication within Africa (Nwagwu, 2005; Ondari-Okemwa, 2007; Tijssen, 2007; Waast, 2002). The increasing use of ICT for the communication of research may also provide a solution if such technologies are developed with Africa’s needs in mind rather than simply mimicking Western models. However, if journals are to be augmented or even replaced by other more effective means of communication, a radical and globally ground-breaking change to the accreditation system for both individuals and institutions will be required; and this itself will require visionary and persuasive intervention from within the continent.
African higher education and African journal publishing are still reeling from the effects of historically misguided domestic and international policy. However, after decades of neglect, higher education is being recognized as crucial if Africa is to develop economically, politically and culturally. The future of the African journal, African research communication more broadly, and even African development in general, depend largely on the extent to which African countries successfully manage to transform their institutions of higher education to fulfil domestic and regional needs and engage globally on their own terms at the same time.