Seeking Impact and Visibility: Scholarly Communication in Southern Africa

Abstract

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. 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.

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

“…Our paper suggests that a new form of exploitation of Africa is at risk via intellectual exploitation, specifically through the publishing medium. Africa faces more challenges than opportunities in making its academic productivity and value visible, but this balance depends on the country and on the institute within Africa (Trotter et al, 2014). A continent with 54 sovereign states and countries, a rich diversity of languages and backgrounds, is the source of a tremendous wealth of intellectual and scientific achievement.…”

Ecologies of (Open) Access: Toward a Knowledge Society

“…The cost of books, for instance, has risen dramatically-starkly so in developing countries when considered as a proportion of income ). 2 A related concern is that educational resources are generally not easily accessible to those in the Global South (Trotter et al 2014). This crisis in scholarly resources is playing out in a broader context of an increasingly commercialized and financialized education.…”

“…New formations that have come into existence make it possible for those previously marginalized by infrastructural and physical constraints to participate in global education and scholarship; indeed, networked environments provide potentially hospitable places for collaboration and communication (Trotter et al 2014). The counternarrative lies in the affordances of the Internet to change the nature of networks by making them more inclusive and easy to participate in (Castells 1996).…”

Usage of institutional repositories in Zimbabwe’s public universities

“…In addition, institutions that are active in research gain higher visibility, usage and impact of their intellectual output, with regard to citations, social return and funding (Swan, Willmers & King 2014). Visibility refers to digital accessibility: metadata of a scholarly object is profiled in a way that makes it easily findable by search engines and databases (Trotter et al 2014). Research has established that articles in OA IRs have a huge citation advantage over other types of OA models (Archambault et al 2014;Zhang & Watson 2017), thus making them the preferred route to OA.…”

“…This is a positive development in that the country's research output is now highly visible and discoverable in the international arena and its impact could increase, thereby contributing to sustainable development, potentially attracting collaborative research and more funding from research funders. The research knowledge can be used by a broader readership of scholars working within and outside academia (Fitzpatrick 2012), including government, industry and civil society for development programmes (Trotter et al 2014).…”