Who Counts? Ghanaian Academic Publishing and Global Science

Description

Since the 1990s, global academic publishing has been transformed by digitisation, consolidation and the rise of the internet. The data produced by commercially-owned citation indexes increasingly defines legitimate academic knowledge. Publication in prestigious �high impact� journals can be traded for academic promotion, tenure and job security. African researchers and publishers labour in the shadows of a global knowledge system dominated by �Northern� journals and by global publishing conglomerates. This book goes beyond the numbers. It shows how the Ghanaian academy is being transformed by this bibliometric economy. It offers a rich account of the voices and perspectives of Ghanaian academics and African journal publishers. How, where and when are Ghana�s researchers disseminating their work, and what do these experiences reveal about an unequal global science system? Is there pressure to publish in �reputable�. international journals? What role do supervisors, collaborators and mentors play? And how do academics manage in conditions of scarcity? Putting the insights of more than 40 Ghanaian academics into dialogue with journal editors and publishers from across the continent, the book highlights creative responses, along with the emergence of new regional research ecosystems. This is an important Africa-centred analysis of Anglophone academic publishing on the continent and its relationship to global science.

Sujets

• Ethnic Studies
• Black Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• African American
• American

Informations

• Publié par: African Minds
• Date de parution: 09 février 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781928502661
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

WHO COUNTS?
Ghanaian academic publishing and global science
David Mills, Patricia Kingori, Abigail Branford, Samuel Tamti Chatio, Natasha Robinson and Paulina Tindana
Critical and up-to-date studies of African journal publishing are rare. This situation does little to help challenge the reality that African researchers rely heavily on journals owned and published outside the continent, that they have little control over or stake in, often to the detriment of the proper appraisal or validation of their research.
This book gives a great sense of the vibrant and energetic research culture at institutions in Ghana. Researchers are doing their best to engage with ‘international’ publishing, citation metrics and requirements of their own institutions, sometimes against the odds, but not without successes, all the while sustaining an embattled and under-resourced regional publishing ecology.
Importantly, the book also documents newer developments, such as the emergence of African-owned, commercial open-access journal publishing enterprises across the continent and in the diaspora that may not entirely follow models established in the West but are nevertheless proving sustainable and productive.
A great strength of the study is that it investigates publishing strategies in Ghana from both the researchers’ and the journals’ viewpoints across humanities and (social) sciences fields, thus bringing together author and publisher, who are too often seen as working at cross-purposes.
Refreshingly undogmatic, the authors reject ‘easy answers’ – such as techutopias, ‘open science’, expensive or unequal open access, the proliferating writing workshops favoured by funders and, most of all, the regime of (commercially-dominated) journal metrics. Instead, they take the continent’s own researchers and journals seriously, elucidating the complex landscape of old and new, commercial and institutional, regional and international publishing.
This careful study makes for important reading for all those involved in the funding, management and policy-making of higher education and research in the African continent and beyond. After all, the very infrastructure of the continent’s publishing – its researchers, journals, university presses and commercial publishing houses – is at stake.
– Stephanie Kitchen, International African Institute, London
Who Counts? revisits important questions regarding the past and future of academic publishing in African universities and research centres. The authors interrogate the adverse implications to African universities and research centres of global research and publication cultures that are marked by various contradicting binaries. The privileging of quantity over quality; business models over a focus on better knowledge production frameworks; encouragement of academics to publish more papers as opposed to better papers as an indicator of academic excellence; the proliferation of open access publishing journals based outside Africa that target submissions from African academics against the spirited denunciation of the emergence of similar journals within African as predatory; the promotion of individual academic and professional growth as opposed to nurturing a vibrant, self-sustaining and sovereign publishing industry anchored in the culture of African countries and institution; and the onslaught by multinational publishers to capture struggling independent publishing outfits in Africa in the context of the new digital economies.
Based on primary data from two universities in Ghana, Who Counts? bravely invites its reader to a new intellectual engagement of an old problem in research and academic publishing in Africa that has kept mutating with little change in its original design. In showing how global research and publishing economies continue to influence individual research and academic careers in Africa at the expense of investing in truly African publishing cultures that echo African interests in the global knowledge production and consumption ecosystems, the authors caution the readership that academic perishing arises from a culture of non-publishing as much as it does from too much publishing that is not anchored in a sovereign agenda.
– Ibrahim Oanda, CODESRIA, Dakar
Published in 2023 by African Minds 4 Eccleston Place, Somerset West, 7130, Cape Town, South Africa [e-mail] www.africanminds.org.za
2022 African Minds

All contents of this document, unless specified otherwise, are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors. When quoting from any of the chapters, readers are requested to acknowledge all of the authors.
ISBN (paper): 978-1-928502-64-7 eBook edition: 978-1-928502-65-4 ePub edition: 978-1-928502-66-1
Copies of this book are available for free download at: www.africanminds.org.za
ORDERS: African Minds Email: [e-mail]
To order printed books from outside Africa, please contact: African Books Collective PO Box 721, Oxford OX1 9EN, UK Email: [e-mail]
Contents
Frequently used acronyms and abbreviations
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: ‘You don’t want to perish’
2 The rise, fall and future of African academic publishing
3 Why publish? Surviving in the Ghanaian university system
4 In search of the ‘international’ journal
5 Learning how to publish: Mentorship, supervision and co-authorship
6 Scarcity and Ghanaian research culture
7 What does the editor think? Perspectives from Ghanaian academic journals
8 Independent academic publishing in anglophone Africa
9 Ghana’s research cultures and the global bibliometric economy
10 Conclusion: Beyond bibliometric coloniality?
Appendix: Research design and ethics
References
Glossary of terms
Frequently used acronyms and abbreviations
AAAS Open
African Academy of Science Open (an ‘open access’ journal platform)
AAS
African Academy of Science
ABDC
Australian Business Deans Council
ADRRI
Africa Development and Resources Research Institute
AJFAND
African Journal of Food, Agriculture, Nutrition and Development
AJOL
African Journals Online
APC
article processing charges
APNET
African Publishers Network
AREF
African Review of Economics and Finance
ASSAf
Academy of Science of South Africa
ASSCAT
Africa Scholarly Science Communications Trust
BANGA-Africa
Building a New Generation of Academics in Africa
BMC
BioMed Central
BMJ
British Medical Journal
CJAS
Contemporary Journal of African Studies
CODESRIA
Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa
COPE
Committee on Publication Ethics
CPD
continual professional development
CSIR
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
DHET
Department for Higher Education and Training
DOAJ
Directory of Open Access Journals
DORA
Declaration on Research Assessment
EAPH
East African Publishing House
ECR
early career researcher
ERI
Education Research International
GhanJOL
Ghana Journals Online
GhIH
Ghana Institute of Horticulture
GJDS
Ghana Journal of Development Studies
GJE
Ghanaian Journal of Economics
GJS
Ghana Journal of Science
HERANA
Higher Education Research and Advocacy Network in Africa
HoD
Head of Department
IBSS
International Bibliography of the Social Sciences
ICT
Information Communication Technology
IJOPPIE
International Journal of Pedagogy, Policy, and ICT in Education
INASP
International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications
ISBN
international standard book number
JHORT
Ghana Journal of Horticulture
JIF
journal impact factor
JPPS
Journal Publishing Practices and Standards
KNUST
Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology
NGO
Non-Governmental Organisation
NSB
National Standards Board (Ghana)
OA
open access
OASPA
Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association
OJS
Open Journal Software
PhD
Doctor of Philosophy
PloS
Public Library of Science
REdalyc
Red de Revistas Científicas de América Latina y El Caribe, España y Portugal
SAJE
Society of African Journal Editors
SciELO
Scientific Electronic Library Online
SIDA
Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency
STM
Science, Technology and Medicine
TD
Journal for Transdisciplinary Research
UCT
University of Cape Town
UDS
University of Development Studies
UG
University of Ghana
UK
United Kingdom
Unisa
University of South Africa
US
United States
USD
United States Dollar
VC
vice-chancellor
WoS
Web of Science
ZAR
South African Rand
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all our Ghanaian interviewees for sparing precious academic time to talk about their research journeys and publishing experiences. African journal editors and publishers were equally generous, allowing us to develop detailed case studies of their journals and companies. Covid-19 forced us to redefine this project, and we are grateful for this support, given the consequences of the pandemic for African higher education systems and researchers. We look forward to sharing the insights of this book with all those who helped make it possible.
Our team made a range of contributions over the course of almost three years. These different tasks of researching and writing are best acknowledged using the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) framework. These include David: conceptualisation, analysis, funding, investigation, methodology, project administration, supervision, writing, review and editing. Patricia: conceptualisation, analysis, supervision, funding, methodology. Abigail: data curation, formal analysis, investigation, writing, review and editing. Samuel: data curation, investigation, methodology, project administration. Natasha: investigation, writing. Paulina: conceptualisation, data curation, analysis, methodology, project administration, supervision, review and editing. An appendix offers a detailed account of the resea