Africa’s challenges in the OA movement: risks and possibilities

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to assess the status of the open access (OA) movement on the African continent, and if there is any financial or moral exploitation by dominant “foreign” world powers. OA provided the African intellectual community with a tool to prove its academic prowess and an opportunity to display cultural and intellectual independence. OA publishing is prone to abuse, and some in Africa have sought to exploit the OA boom to profit from non-academic activity rather than use this tool to glorify Africa’s image and diversity on the global intellectual stage. These issues are explored in detail in the paper. Design/methodology/approach The authors broadly assessed literature that is related to the growth and challenges associated with OA, including the rise of OA mega journals, in Africa. Findings African OA journals and publishers have to compete with established non-African OA entities. Some are considered “predatory”, but this Jeffrey Beall-based classification may be erroneous. Publishing values that African OA publishers and journals aspire to should not equal those published by non-African publishing entities. Africa should seek solutions to the challenges on that continent via Africa-based OA platforms. The budding African OA movement is applauded, but it must be held as accountable as any other OA journal or publisher. Originality/value African scholars need to reassess the “published in Africa” OA image.

Who are the 100 largest scientific publishers by journal count? A webscraping approach

“…4–5; Okune et al. , 2018; Teixeira da Silva et al. , 2019) or that publish articles in languages other than English (“LOTE”) (Ren and Rousseau, 2002; Vera-Baceta et al.…”

“…This is especially pertinent to those that are either located in the Global South (Collyer, 2018;Jimenez et al, in press, pp. 4-5;Okune et al, 2018;Teixeira da Silva et al, 2019) or that publish articles in languages other than English ("LOTE") (Ren and Rousseau, 2002;Vera-Baceta et al, 2019). They are not always indexed in the major scientific databases, and some of them do not issue DOIs for various reasons, making it easy to overlook them in conventional searches.…”

Handling Ethics Dumping and Neo-Colonial Research: From the Laboratory to the Academic Literature

“…Such steps would allow a new and more equitable mindset to be established that is fair and reciprocal (de Vries 2020 ) and would ultimately benefit LIC researchers. Resource scarcity is particularly acute in Africa, where academics face not only a challenge from resource limitations (Amugune and Otieno-Omutoko 2019 ) but also in publishing, where resource-derived intellect and output often vie, in a “publish and perish” environment, for a place in competitive and expensive open access venues (Teixeira da Silva et al 2019a ), and where both LIC and HIC collaborators face exploitative and predatory publishing practices (Teixeira da Silva et al 2019b ). For a collaboration to be equitable, it must also ensure equality (Hendricks and Donnir 2019 ), and publishing provides one viable possibility for this to be achieved, in which the production of an academic paper confers reward and prestige, and provides intellectual equality, even in a resource-minimalist setting.…”