Predatory publishing also fuelled by promotion criteria

African universities have been urged to discourage academic staff from publishing in fake and predatory journals that are marketed for economic gain but have no scholarship value. The call was made by several scholars during the virtual African Universities’ Week.

The theme of African Universities’ Week, which took place from 9-12 November, was “Digital Transformation in African Higher and Tertiary Education”.

Dr Violet Makuku, the project manager of the harmonisation of African higher education, quality assurance and accreditation initiative at the Association of African Universities, said many lecturers and professors were contributing research articles to predatory journals hoping it would help them to get promoted and to enjoy the prestige of publishing many papers.

“Some of these journals can publish papers within 20 hours once they receive payment from authors,” said Makuku.

But, she said, the bulk of the research papers published in predatory journals did not go through credibility and quality checks or peer reviews, as the main objective of the publishers was to collect money from authors.

“Some of those papers are often re-published with different titles and [so] it becomes easier for one [a researcher] to have many papers in a short time,” said Makuku.

More African journals needed

Highlighting the worrisome expansion of the commercialisation of academic papers in the predatory press, Makuku said the issue was now a major problem in African universities, as many academic staff members were no longer focused on intellectual progress or patents.

This phenomenon was fuelled by the rigidity of the current promotion criteria in many African universities, which was based on the publish or perish model and did not necessarily question what had been published or the academic quality of the journal.

“The promotion yardstick in most African universities has killed the advancement and relevance of higher and tertiary education, as it continues to lag behind the advancement of contemporary issues linked to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals,” Makuku told University World News in an interview.

She advised African universities and the national higher education quality assurance agencies on the continent to adopt the South African model whereby journals were listed and reviewed regularly to make sure they met quality standards.

“Journals which do not meet the standards are slashed off the register and publication in such journals does not contribute towards an application for promotion,” said Makuku.

Amid efforts to improve the quality of research in Africa, Dr Justine Chinoperekweyi, academic dean of the Harare-based Centre for Organization Leadership and Development, said there was an urgent need for African universities to start their own high-quality journals which could stop academic staff, researchers and students from publishing research articles without added value.

He pointed out the emerging lack of academic discipline, whereby even directors of research in African universities regularly published in predatory online journals.

According to Chinoperekweyi, predatory journals were now a threat to the validity and reliability of published works by African scholars. “It is high time universities in the continent restored credibility and even encouraged self-policing among academic staff,” said Chinoperekweyi.

Teaching loads should be considered

But to attain such an objective, Chinoperekweyi stated that universities should expand the criteria for promotion that should include teaching, innovation and patents.

In this regard, Makuku wondered how African universities expected lecturers to climb the academic ladder when they spend 95% of their time teaching. While it was an accepted practice to promote staff who published new knowledge in peer-reviewed publications, Makuku argued that promotions should also take into consideration the teaching of undergraduate students, as well as applied research, which could yield innovations.

According to Professor Catherine Ngila, the acting executive director at the African Academy of Sciences, research in African universities was facing a crisis, as most of the academic staff and the postgraduate students were engaged in arm-chair research practices.

“Very little new knowledge is coming out of Africa’s tertiary institutions. Although some universities purport to do research, they are almost doing nothing,” said Ngila, a former deputy vice-chancellor in charge of academic and student affairs at the Nairobi-based Riara University.

In order to improve research activities and academic research in African universities, Makuku and other scholars who spoke on the establishment, maintenance and stability of high-quality journals, said academics should also work on the quality of the content they taught. “With obsolete content, academic staff cannot claim to have published any new research,” said Makuku.

To expand the footprint of credible research in African academia, Makuku said there was a need to increase the number of postgraduate programmes and to reward those who come up with new knowledge.