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E-book Who Counts? : Ghanaian Academic Publishing and Global Science

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Penilaian

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The conversation had taken an unexpected turn. It is not often that people compare academic publishing and churchgoing. Nor would many think of using age as a measure of the credibility of an academic journal. Yet Akosua’s witty apercu, offered in an interview about academic publishing practices in Ghana, reveals an important truth. A scholarly journal’s reputation is hard-won, and can take many years to acquire. A senior social scientist at the university of Ghana, with professorial rank, Akosua knew that publishing in the ‘right’ journals was critical to building a scholarly career. She understood the subtle intertwining of journal reputation and scholarly credibility. Academics constantly evaluate each other’s ideas, primarily through the quality of their research and ideas, but also through the status of the journals in which they publish. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first leader, understood the vital importance of Africa-centred academic knowledge ‘free from the propositions and prepositions of the colonial epoch’ (Nkrumah 1963, 2). Nkrumah’s optimistic vision for an African Studies that studied Africa ‘in its widest possible sense – Africa in all its complexity and diversity’ (Nkrumah 1963, 9) coincided with the post-war expansion of higher education, the development of a global science system, and the professionalisation of academic publishing (Gray 2020). In the early years of the postcolonial era, a vibrant set of research cultures flourished in Africa’s new universities and indigenous publishing houses. Decolonising research and academic publishing and policies of indigenisation went hand in hand. From the 1970s onwards, political and financial crises undermined African university research ecosystems, and European commercial publishers once again dominated. Since the 1990s, the global publishing landscape has been transformed by digitisation, consolidation and the rise of the internet. The original goal of knowledge dissemination now sits alongside opportunities for individual academics to garner career capital and for businesses to extract financial profit (Fyfe et al. 2017). Governments around the world have begun to measure the research performance of public universities, developing ever more elaborate mechanisms for assessing the quality and quantity of research. Influential numerical proxies – such as the ‘impact factor’ generated by citation indexes – are used to rank the academic prestige of journals. Publication in ‘high impact’ journals can be traded for academic promotions, tenure and job security. There is an increasing hierarchy of journal prestige, and ‘credibility’ (Mills and Robinson 2021) has become the symbolic currency of a global research economy.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

070.5667 MIL w

Penerbit

South Africa : African Minds., 2023

Deskripsi Fisik

239 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781928502647

Klasifikasi

070.5667

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Publishing in Ghana

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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