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SEEKING IMPACT AND VISIBILITY Scholarly communication in Southern Africa
Eve Gray
Scholarly Communication in Africa: Aligning Strategy and Technology for Increased Visibility of Southern African Research
Henry Trotter, Eve Gray
The Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP) seeks to understand and address some of the tensions that impede effective scholarly communication and publication in southern African universities. Underpinning this is an understanding of the importance, in a 21st century globally-networked world, of the conjuncture of information and communication technologies (ICTs), professional publishing skills and institutional capacity development if African scholarship is to find its voice in the global arena. The programme aims to explore ways for African research to have a more positive impact on the developmental imperatives of the continent by examining, with host universities, the alignment between scholarly communication practices and institutional and national development goals. This paper discusses the origins, processes and interventions SCAP has initiated at four southern African university, in Botswana, Cape Town, Mauritius and Namibia.
Scholarly Communication at the University of Namibia: Case study report
2014 •
Michelle Willmers
Advances in Library and Information Science
Open Access and the Future of Scholarly Communication in Sub-Saharan Africa
Akakandelwa Akakandelwa
The concept of open access has opened up access to scholarly communication. Academia today can publish and have access to a co*cktail of information resources without restrictions and without paying anything. This chapter seeks to explain open access to scholarly communication and its future in Sub-Saharan Africa. The chapter begins by explaining the concept of open access, various forms of open access publishing, benefits of open access, and a brief history of open access to scholarly communication in Sub-Saharan Africa. The chapter also highlights some notable open access initiatives that have been implemented in Sub-Saharan Africa in the quest to improve access to scientific research findings in order to accelerate economic development. Furthermore, the chapter catalogues some challenges being encountered in the promotion of open access in Sub-Saharan Africa. Lastly, the chapter predicts the future of open access to scholarly communication in Sub-Saharan Africa, based on the curre...
CODESRIA-ASC CONFERENCE SERIES 2006 Bridging the North-South Divide in Scholarly Communication: Threats and Opportunities in the Digital Era At the South-eastern Frontier: the impact of higher education policy on African research publication
Eve Gray
Digital media, with their capacity to reduce the cost of information dissemination and to effortlessly cross borders, offer new possibilities for overcoming the marginalization of African research publication in the global community. In turn, Open Access publishing models show signs of generating substantially greater research impact and increasing citation levels, particularly for publications from the developing world. This paper will tackle a relatively neglected area of study - the policy context in which research publication happens in African universities. In particular, it will map the contradictions and distortions that occur when national research policy initiatives targeting development goals meet up with policies for publication reward systems that effectively drive publication - even of African Studies - out of Africa into the USA and Europe. The context of the paper is a research programme that I am carrying out as an International Policy Fellow in the field of Open Inf...
Scholarly Communication at the University of Namibia
2014 •
Henry Trotter, kingo J mchombu
African scholarly research is relatively invisible globally because, even though research production on the continent is growing in absolute terms, it is falling in comparative terms. In addition, traditional metrics of visibility, such as the Impact Factor, fail to make legible all African scholarly production. And many African universities also do not take a strategic approach to scholarly communication to broaden the reach of their scholars’ work. To address this challenge, the Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP) was established to help raise the visibility of African scholarship by mapping current research and communication practices in Southern African universities and by recommending and piloting technical and administrative innovations based on open access dissemination principles. To do this, SCAP conducted extensive research in four faculties at the Universities of Botswana, Cape Town, Mauritius and Namibia. In the University of Namibia’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, SCAP found that scholars: • carry heavy teaching and administrative loads which hinder their research productivity • remain unconvinced by open access dissemination • find it easier to collaborate with scholars in the global North than in the rest of Africa • rarely communicate their research with government • engage in small, locally-based research projects that are either unfunded or funded by the university • produce outputs that are often interpretive, derivative or applied due, in part, to institutional rewards structures and funding challenges • do not utilise social media technologies to disseminate their work or seek new collaborative opportunities. All of these factors impact UNAM’s research in/visibility at a time when scholarly communication is going through dramatic technical, legal, social and ethical changes. “Scholarly Communication at the University of Namibia” shares the results of SCAP’s research and advocacy efforts at UNAM’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. It not only analyses the faculty’s scholarly communication ecosystem, but illuminates the opportunities available for raising the visibility of its scholarship. It concludes with a series of recommendations that would enhance the communicative and developmental potential of the university’s research as a whole. This study will be of interest for scholars of African higher education, academically linked civil society organisations, educationally affiliated government personnel and university researchers and managers.
Visibility of Scholarly Research and Changing Research Communication Practices: A Case Study from Namibia
Laura Czerniewicz
Scholars globally are increasingly required to account for the visibility and impact of their research, and visibility and impact are increasingly digitally-mediated through the platforms and practices associated with Web 2.0. Traditional prestige-based metrics of visibility (ISI/WoS Impact Factor) measure only scholar-to-scholar outputs like journals and books. In many African universities with nascent research cultures, legacies of colonialism and imperatives of national development, these measures present scholars with particular challenges. At the same time, in the North, moves towards Open Access, along with the potential of Web 2.0 technologies for increasing visibility of research, offer the potential for changes to traditional measures of assessing impact and visibility. Using a framework whereby the extent of change in research communication practices at all stages of the research process can be analysed, this paper reveals the pressures shaping African research communication practices and the visibility of research, using data from a case study at the University of Namibia.
Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Conference in Information and Communication Technologies (ICICT 2018)
Research Visibility in the Global South: Towards Increased Online Visibility of Scholarly Research Output in Zambia
2018 •
Lighton Phiri
Scholarly research and publication forms an integral part of the core functions of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). It is generally standard practice for HEIs to deposit scholarly output into publicly accessible Institutional Repositories (IRs). While Zambia has seen a rise in the number of HEIs, with a total of six Public HEIs and 60 Private HEIs, there is little online visibility of scholarly output generated by these HEIs. A bibliometric analysis, focused on electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), was conducted by harvesting scholarly publications from HEIs IRs, in order to demonstrate the low online visibility of scholarly research output in Zambia. We also outline technological initiatives, by using case examples from The University of Zambia, that can be employed to potentially increase the online visibility of HEIs scholarly output. Specifically, we illustrate how subject repositories and downstream aggregate services can be utilised to increase the visibility of scholarly output. The study shows that only two HEIs have established IRs, with noticeably low scholarly publications by academic staff. In addition, there is a noticeably long delay between the publication date of the ETDs and the ingestion date into the IRs. In addition, while not comprehensive, the proposed initiatives demonstrate technological initiates that could be employed to increase the visibility of scholarly research output.
Scholarly Communication at the University of Botswana
2014 •
Henry Trotter, totolo angelina
"African scholarly research is relatively invisible globally because, even though research production on the continent is growing in absolute terms, it is falling in comparative terms. In addition, traditional metrics of visibility, such as the Impact Factor, fail to make legible all African scholarly production. And many African universities also do not take a strategic approach to scholarly communication to broaden the reach of their scholars’ work. To address this challenge, the Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP) was established to help raise the visibility of African scholarship by mapping current research and communication practices in Southern African universities and by recommending and piloting technical and administrative innovations based on open access dissemination principles. To do this, SCAP conducted extensive research in four faculties at the Universities of Botswana, Cape Town, Mauritius and Namibia. In the University of Botswana’s Faculty of Humanities, SCAP found that scholars: • carry heavy teaching and administrative loads which hinder their research productivity • remain unconvinced by open access dissemination • find it easier to collaborate with scholars in the global North than in the rest of Africa • rarely communicate their research with government • engage in small, locally-based research projects that are either unfunded or funded by the university • produce outputs that are often interpretive, derivative or applied due, in part, to institutional rewards structures and funding challenges • do not utilize social media technologies to disseminate their work or seek new collaborative opportunities. All of these factors impact UB’s research in/visibility at a time when scholarly communication is going through dramatic technical, legal, social and ethical changes. “Scholarly Communication at the University of Botswana” shares the results of SCAP’s research and advocacy efforts at UB’s Faculty of Humanities. It not only analyses the faculty’s scholarly communication ecosystem, but illuminates the opportunities available for raising the visibility of its scholarship. It concludes with a series of recommendations that would enhance the communicative and developmental potential of the university’s research as a whole. This study will be of interest for scholars of African higher education, academically linked civil society organizations, educationally affiliated government personnel and university researchers and managers."
Operationalizing Barriers to Dissemination of African Research and Scholarship: Case Study, Research Review (Ghana
Mwalimu Shujaa
