Study highlights concern about publishing practices

Open-access academic publishing may have opened gateways for research from higher education scholars to be disseminated through the internet, but there are concerns that too few Sub-Saharan African researchers publish peer-reviewed articles in the online publishing industry, according to an ongoing joint study between the Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre at the University of Cambridge and Education Sub-Saharan Africa (ESSA).

Focusing on the bibliometrics of publications contained in the African Education Research Database, Dr Samuel Asare, the research manager at ESSA, and his associates Professor Pauline Rose, the director of the REAL Centre, and Dr Rafael Mitchell, a lecturer in comparative and international education at the University of Bristol in the UK, found that, of 1,858 articles in the database for the period 2010-18, only 25% were on open-access platforms.

The African Education Research Database is a comprehensive online catalogue that holds theses on African education issues and peer-reviewed publications from 49 African countries.

The database was established in 2018 as an academic partnership between the REAL Centre and ESSA, a charity aimed at transforming education research outcomes in Africa.

Impact factor challenges

According to the three researchers, questions are also being raised about the quality of education research from the region. It is also problematic that many African researchers do not have access to quality studies published in internationally recognised journals to learn from.

In their latest study published in January 2021, the researchers note that open-access articles from the region are concentrated in journals with a lower impact factor, which may be considered of lower quality.

The impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a specific year. The higher the impact factor, the more highly ranked the journal.

In this regard, faced with high processing fees for open access in higher quality journals, most researchers in Sub-Saharan Africa tend to publish in journals with a lower impact factor.

“Such constraints are likely to continue to undermine the visibility and impact of work by Africa-based researchers,” Asare and his associates wrote.

Despite the radical shift of academic publications transitioning into both digital and hard copy format, African researchers, students and other stakeholders are constrained by the cost of processing fees and journal subscriptions.

The ability to read online access articles is usually influenced by weak internet connectivity, unstable power supply, inadequate institutional computer networks and lower quality personal digital devices.

Further evidence from the African Education Research Database indicates that education research in Sub-Saharan Africa is struggling with respect to visibility, as it continues to receive below-average scholarly engagement as measured by citation data.

In a study fronted by Mitchell, the three researchers argued that the visibility of academic scholarship from Sub-Saharan Africa continued to be impacted by a colonial legacy and heavy reliance on early career members of faculty, with heavy teaching loads.

Although the database searches revealed some direct influence of donor-based actors and agencies towards shaping education research in various countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Mitchell pointed out how academic incentive criteria in some universities were undermining quality of research.

“For example, in Nigeria and other countries where researchers are rewarded for the quantity over the quality of their outputs, the rise of pay-to-publish predatory journals has led to a proliferation of articles of little scholarly value,” said Mitchell, quoting Dr Ayokunle Olumuyiwa Omobowale, a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Ibadan.

Peripheral presence

In circumstances in which research is funded or conducted in partnership with foreign donors, there are indications that the supporting agencies determine the focus of the research.

What this means is that, in donor-funded education research projects, African researchers are likely to continue working or occupying peripheral positions that are reflected in titles such as partner, collaborator, contract researcher, co-investigator, research assistant, or advisory board member.

This type of academic relationship is captured by Gilles Carbonnier, professor of development economics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, and Tiina Kontinen, associate professor of international development studies at the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland in a study by the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes on research partnership practices between the South and the North.

“The role of the Southern partners is primarily limited to collecting data, while Northern partners play a leading role in data analysis and outcomes of academic publications,” stated Carbonnier and Kontinen in their study.

The researchers found that the problem is exacerbated by mounting pressure to publish research outcomes fast in journals edited in the North, while harsh competition for funding seriously limits the time and scope available to establish equitable partnership frameworks.

Last year, using the African Education Research Database, Asare, Mitchell and Rose established that education research partnerships involving African scholars and funding from outside agencies in the North favoured very few countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Inequalities in research partnerships

They revealed significant inequalities in the participation of Sub-Saharan African countries in international education research projects.

In this regard, Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, and Uganda account for about half of the collaborative outputs. “Adding Ethiopia to the group, these countries are responsible for almost two-thirds of internationally collaborative publication outputs,” the researchers found.

Further analysis showed that, with the exception of Nigeria, those countries have the highest volume of peer-reviewed research in the region.

Nigeria has the highest number of education research output on the database, but fewer international collaborative research publications.

One possible explanation, according to Omobowale, is that paid-for journals are popular in Nigeria due to the demand for off-shore publications by some universities’ promotion committees, irrespective of the quality.

Subsequently, Nigeria is on a medium-tier, together with Malawi, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Zambia, Botswana, and Mozambique (in that order) in terms of volume of output in international collaboration.

Among the countries with the fewest publications are Somalia, Chad, Central African Republic and Democratic Republic of Congo. These countries have all experienced conflict in recent years.

According to Asare, South Africa was omitted from database searches as the country was not affected by the same challenges as others in the region in terms of scope and visibility of publications.

What is disconcerting is that researchers in universities and other institutions from Northern countries tend to partner with researchers from Sub-Saharan African countries that have the greatest volume of research outputs, namely Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda.

This scenario implied that, in most instances, the research funding modalities and other partnership practices have a specific agenda that is not meant to improve capacity building in Sub-Saharan Africa but to improve academic ranking and visibility of funding institutions and their researchers.

In this regard, Carbonnier said: “The more Northern institutions put an emphasis on publishing numerous articles in renowned journals for their own survival, the weaker the incentive to invest in building effective partnerships that contribute to capacity building and inclusion.”

Unequal relationships that could have implications for career progression and visibility of African researchers was noted in the bibliometric datasets in the African Education Research Database.

Of a sizeable proportion of publications by scholars based in Sub-Saharan Africa and their collaborating institutions outside the region, only a third of such publications had an African-based researcher as the first author, according to the ESSA and REAL Centre researchers.

Although outside partnerships, collaboration and investment in research initiatives in Sub-Saharan Africa are usually seen as catalysts to strengthen research capacity-building systems in the region, it is hard to rule out that competition for research funds, institutional ranking and visibility of researchers associated with funding agencies could be in the driving seat.