Publish or Perish: Remaining Academically Relevant and Visible In the Global Academic Scene through Scholarly Publishing

Abstract:  The paper reviews and analyzes ways and means of remaining academically relevant and visible in Africa by employing several methods in scholarly publishing. A literature-based opinion paper, survey and analysis of definitions of scholarly publishing and related methods for publishing, visibility of scholarly works by African scholars, problems with the current publishing models, initiatives for promoting African scholarly works, challenges hindering scholarly publishing in Africa, and strategies for making African scholars academically relevant. Despite the availability of many opportunities, African Scholars are yet to maximize their potential by taking advantage of these opportunities. Technological advances have helped in propelling the hitherto unexploited area of scholarly publishing by providing many avenues that were hard to come by in the recent past. Being an area without many options, academic visibility relies on publishing or perishing. Apart from a few, most African academic institutions rarely encourage and provide avenues for making themselves and scholars relevant and visible. To improve the visibility of scholars’ works and make them relevant on the academic scene, electronic publishing will be advisable. This provides the potential to readers to search and locate the articles at minimum time within one journal or across multiple journals. This includes publishing articles in journals that are reputable and listed in various databases and peer reviewed. Academic institutions are advised to avail their publications in the listed databases and embrace electronic publishing through hosting of university journals in university websites, self-archiving or starting institutional repositories and also listing under directory of institutional repositories. Embracing open access in electronically published materials is another way.