Academic publishing needs creative solutions to grow

COVID-19 has dampened academic research productivity even though virtual conferences and webinars have become an antidote for visa denials and a shortage of travel funding. Where academic publishing is concerned, there may be solutions to promote development in African countries as well as increase international support.

The publishing industry in Africa is weak. There is a lack of distribution hubs and intra-Africa book trade, and curricula, pedagogy and learning processes are still rooted in the colonial situation, leading to the absence of a scholarship culture.

Scholarly publishing in South Africa is financially motivating for authors who earn a research incentive for their universities from the state. They will continue to publish, thanks to this incentive and due to good institutional support, said Keyan Gray Tomaselli, distinguished professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg.

For the rest of Africa, other than Zimbabwe and perhaps Botswana, the low publishing output might well prevail due to a lack of encouragement and institutional support, and the lure of paid consultancies, he said. University presses are currently available in Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

“The challenges – in relation to the above – are to do research for research sake, build critical mass via inter-institutional collaborations, and to work across universities to build a continental research and publishing infrastructure,” Tomaselli said.

Opportunities to improve publishing?

In 2021, the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) piloted a programme aimed at luring African scholarly publishers seeking to deepen transnational dialogue and collaboration among academic publishers.

“The AUPresses Global Partner Programme had a modest experience during its pilot year in 2021,” Peter Berkery, executive director of AUPresses, told University World News. The AUPresses, an organisation of more than 150 international non-profit scholarly publishers operating since 1937, aimed to pair non-member presses in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America in a year-long global partner programme, but it did not come to fruition.

Berkery said the AUPresses board of directors has agreed to extend the pilot for another year, incorporating what was learned last year regarding partner selection, matching, and guidance.

“Once we have implemented these changes to improve the pilot, we plan to begin outreach to recruit a new round of global partners,” he said.

African Minds from South Africa partnered with Duke University Press from North Carolina in the US, which publishes about 150 books annually and 56 journals. The leaders of African Minds and Duke University Press had several productive conversations over the course of the year, despite the pressures and disruptions of the pandemic, and continue to explore potential collaborations.

Unfortunately, partner Makerere University Press in Uganda found itself unable to engage with Liverpool University Press in the UK.

South Africa is a country with numerous functioning academic presses that often work in collaboration with overseas co-publishers and distributors. Unfortunately, in the rest of Africa, there are few such presses and many are not functional, Tomaselli said.

How will academics be nurtured to publish?

In yet another development to address the shortage of academic books written by African academics, the Academic and Non-fiction Authors’ Association of South Africa (ANFASA) in 2022 offers writing grants for books, and workshops on book publishing, authorship and copyright issues. ANFASA is not a scholarly publisher but works on behalf of authors’ rights and is involved in training both within and beyond the academic enterprise.

“With the shift to open access, underfunding of university presses, and the contraction of reading markets, university presses are going to require ever-greater institutional support,” said Tomaselli, who also edits ANFASA Magazine, the organisation’s newsletter.

One of ANFASA’s current projects is working with the journal Critical Arts regarding a double special issue written by post-doctoral students who are given a year’s training, from proposal to submission.

The best 20 articles that pass peer review will be published by the journal in late 2022, with support provided by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences in South Africa. The applicants are all invited to regular training workshops offered by ANFASA, Critical Arts, and Taylor & Francis. This initiative mainly focuses on publication in journals.

Further, graduate students are invited to write short articles for the ANFASA Magazine on their research, writing and publishing experiences, which is quite empowering, Tomaselli said.

Will open science platforms triumph?

Elizabeth Marincola, a publishing expert based in Kenya, said: “From our point of view, the most exciting and perhaps impactful development in 2022 will be the launch of Africa Open.”

This is the successor platform to AAS Open Research that will continue to offer innovative publish-before-peer-review open access, globally indexed publishing for African researchers through their programme funders, she said.

“The most basic challenge for researchers in Africa continues to be funding,” Marincola said.

As the SFA and other high-quality organisations continue to fund world-class research in Africa, the continent will continue to attract research funding.

“Funding, of course, is related to pretty much any ancillary issue in science in Africa. For example, as funding opportunities build, so will opportunities for excellent training in Africa, increasing the retention of Africa’s best scientists on the continent,” Marincola added.

Regarding publishing issues, funding for Article Processing Charges (APCs) to enable researchers to publish open access will continue to be in demand. As providing for APCs in grant funding becomes the international standard, this problem will be mitigated, she said.

Support for the most selective scientific research in Africa continues to originate in the Global North. “We must build a compelling case for African governments and philanthropists to support research. Of course, there is both a strong human welfare as well as an economic argument to be made for doing so. As continental funding builds, dependence on European and US funders may stabilise in the long run,” she said.

According to Marincola, predatory publishers continue to target researchers in Africa and Asia. One encouraging development is the recent successful prosecution of OMICS, one of the world’s biggest predatory publishers of open-access academic journals. The charges were brought by the US Federal Trade Commission.

“While it’s questionable whether the multimillion-dollar judgment against OMICS will ever be collected, it sends a clear signal to other predatory publishers that exploitation is not being tolerated,” she said.

While COVID-19 and its dampening of movement and productivity continues to put a question mark on academic research, Marincola said, the silver lining is that, as virtual conferences, webinars, and other virtual modes of information sharing become more common, previous barriers (financial, visas, time) to full participation of African researchers in global information and data generation may be mitigated.