The emergence of an open access publishing system based on article publication charges has introduced substantial global inequities. Stephanie Kitchen, David Mills and Mame-Penda Ba argue that for African research to have local and global influence requires a focus on ‘Afrostructuring’, the creation and maintenance of African scholarly publishing infrastructures that derive from and serve the needs of African researchers.

In 2024, the article processing charge (APC) to publish a scientific paper open access in the journal Nature is £8,990/$12,290. Is this the price of prestige? Or a reflection of the pressures on Springer Nature to maximise its profits and appeal to shareholders? Springer Nature’s successful October Frankfurt stock market flotation provides some clues.

Academic careers are made by getting an article published in Nature, one of the best known scientific brands. Its owners have made the most of this brand recognition: whilst Nature itself is amongst the top 20, there are ten other Nature-branded journals that have higher impact factors. As we explore in our recently co-edited issue of Global Africa, citations and impact factors of journals such as Nature have become the dominant currency of the global academic ‘credibility economy’, despite the many limitations of these measures.

What do open access publication charges, now standard across many leading journals, mean for researchers in poorer countries without access to large grants? As publishers transition their journals to APC models, researchers from the global South are excluded on grounds of (in)ability to pay, or forced to ‘choose’ between paying publishing charges and other vital research activities. As Mame-Penda Ba writes, we have a ‘duty to express indignation at the incredible violence that a small group of multinational scientific publishers is inflicting on the global South, and on Africa in particular’. We might also ask, following Walter Rodney, is Africa being underdeveloped once again?

Articles and researchers’ resources flow to journals published and owned outside the continent, where they may face other barriers to publishing.

One response from commercial publishers has been to set up fee waiver schemes for those based in low-income countries. Yet these benefit few, as many authors are in middle income countries, who at best can negotiate a discount. This commercialisation in turn has consequences for academics in the majority world doing their best to edit hundreds of deeply relevant, but poorly resourced ‘local’ or regional journals. They struggle with visibility, to maintain journal reputations and to attract sufficient high-quality submissions. Articles and researchers’ resources flow to journals published and owned outside the continent, where they may face other barriers to publishing. In 2023 only 0.35% of journals (52, of which 41 were from South Africa) indexed in the Web of Science (the generator of JIF) were published in and from Africa. Citation indexes reinforce ‘bibliometric coloniality’, and make this global geography of research more unequal.

Our Global Africa issue published in English and French (with abstracts additionally in Arabic and Swahili) considers questions of scale, and how to balance ‘local’ versus global publishing from the African continent. Some of the contributions offer a vision of the continent that is more integrated and contributes more to global science. They recognise the necessity of today’s commercially-owned publishing infrastructures for enabling scientific communication. Others make the case for properly resourced and supported African-focused scholarly ecosystems.

In 2023 only 0.35% of journals indexed in the Web of Science were published in and from Africa.

The model of open access publishing developed by the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLASCO) is often used as an exemplar for such a system. Yet with negligible financial support for research and development across the continent (South Africa and the Maghreb being the only exceptions) this remains a distant dream. In the editorial, Mame-Penda Ba calls for an ‘afrostructure’ of scientific publishing, endogenously financed, open to all, attentive to diversity and the importance of recognising all forms of scientific work.

All can agree on the need for vibrant African research, knowledge and publishing systems. We can surely accommodate an academic world in which both ‘local’ journals, such those in history, archaeology, anthropology, languages and specific health ecologies coexist with international scientific journals in genomics, astrophysics, artificial intelligence, and beyond. But in Africa, as a comprehensive 2024 report by EIFL has made clear, journal infrastructures and publishing resources are lacking.

European publishing policies have made this situation worse, excluding researchers from the global South. In 2019, the International African Institute (where Stephanie Kitchen works) stated the following in its joint submission to the ‘Plan S’ consultation:

“We share the aim of proponents of Plan S to open access to high quality published research for readers and writers. We are not, however, convinced that the Plan will achieve this in relation to our region and disciplines, and we are concerned it may do the opposite. … Plan S is damagingly divisive. It is potentially Eurocentric – driven predominantly by the interests of European science with scant regard for knowledge production systems outside the global North.”

A recent ALPSP meeting in London on ‘Plan S and Beyond’ revealed that neither the major scientific publishers, nor Plan S policymakers, had anticipated such consequences. Instead, Plan S has created opportunities for the legacy publishers to benefit from lucrative ‘transformative agreements’ and to launch new open access mega-journals. Meanwhile new ‘challenger’ publishers such as Hindawi (subsequently bought by Wiley), Frontiers and MDPI have driven rapid growth through special issue-isation. The number of open access articles published from 2009–23 has grown approximately four and a half-fold, whilst subscription based journal publishing has increased, albeit it at a much slower rate, as the graph below shows.

Fig.1: Source, Long term global trends in open access, Heidbach, K., Knaus, J., Laut, I., & Palzenberger, M. (2022).

As the academic publishing community fragments, the global diamond open access movement gains momentum. Its second global summit will be held in Cape Town in December 2024, supported by UNESCO, the French development agency IRD and other Open Science policy actors. It champions an appealing vision of a future defined by ‘inclusive and equitable participation in the scholarly publishing ecosystem’. Yet there is a risk that this might amount to an ‘infrastructure of utopia’. This was how Ferdinand de Jong and Brian Valentin Quinn described the abandoned remains of Senegal’s ‘University of the African future’. Will diamond open access reinforce a second-class status for humanities and social science journals based in the majority world, largely ignored by global indexes and invisible to the credibility economy?

Will diamond open access reinforce a second-class status for humanities and social science journals based in the majority world, largely ignored by global indexes and invisible to the credibility economy?

Beyond the symbolism of summitry, we need to think about the everyday logistics of journal management in a digital age, and the need to promote bibliodiversity and linguistic pluralism in global science. As Mame-Penda Ba points out: ‘The idea that translation is expensive and delays the editorial process is … a mere scarecrow designed to maintain a status quo that is detrimental to bibliodiversity and plurilingualism.’ If translation can be done in Senegal, it can equally be done in London and Amsterdam and New Jersey.

Africa’s governments and research funders will ultimately determine the direction of the continent’s research publishing systems. Afrostructuring tempers ambition with realism, and recognises that the first step needs to be endogenous support for Africa’s publishing infrastructures.

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