Equity, Equality and Justice in Social Science Research in Africa

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

“…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. Although simple long-distance email or online-based techniques can be used to achieve an objective such as mental health research capacity-building (Mathai et al 2019 ), and since there is a considerable divide between the health and mental health infrastructures in LICs and HICs (Palk and Stein 2020 ; Palk et al 2020 ), great care and caution are needed for the online collection of data, for example via social media (Bamdad, Finaughty, and Johns 2022 ).…”