Research: Supersize it!

"African research suffers from a lack of visibility. A regional mega-journal could provide a better platform for research, while helping to evaluate its real-world development impacts, writes Eve Gray. Although production of research outputs out of Africa has increased in absolute terms in recent years, this started from a low base and is falling behind in comparative terms compared to emerging countries such as Brazil and China. Faced with very low levels of journal publication in Africa, the assumption often made in commentaries on African research is that little research is being carried out. It might, therefore, come as a surprise that one of the key recommendations to emerge from a recent investigation into the visibility and impact of scholarly communication in Southern Africa was that funding agencies should help determine the feasibility of developing a regional mega-journal, along the lines of the open-access PLOS ONE. How could one contemplate a mega-journal in the face of such low volumes of research output? Firstly, a mega-journal would provide a common platform for African research. Secondly, it might provide better opportunities for multi-disciplinary publishing, which could promote the interaction between natural and social sciences that is often necessary for developmental research impact. These are some of the key findings of the Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP), an initiative of Canada’s International Development Research Centre started in March 2010, to raise the visibility and impact of African scholarships. The programme set out to map current research and communication practices in four Southern African universities (Botswana, Cape Town, Mauritius and Namibia), as well as pilot open access approaches to research dissemination. One of the problems SCAP identified was the failure of universities to take a strategic approach to scholarly communication. This included failing to use appropriate ICT and Web 2.0 technologies to broaden the reach of scholars’ work or curate it for future generations, inadvertently minimising the impact and visibility of African research in the digital age. African researchers’ failure to use modern digital technology in this way is often articulated as one of access to technology. However, in contrast, the SCAP found that the necessary technologies were either already available at the universities, or potentially available at little or no cost to the institution. The problem, the programme found, was rather the failure to incorporate modern technology into a strategic plan incorporating skills and capacity challenges posed by a changing digital environment ..."