University of Nigeria, Nsukka Open Access Publishing and the Future of Scholarship in Africa A paper presented at the 2017 Open Access Week, University of Nigeria Nsukka, October 24, 2017 Ifeanyi J Ezema (PhD) Digital Librarian University of Nigeria, Nsukka ORCID: 0000-0001-5127-4798 https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ifeanyi_Ezema/contributions

Introduction Open access movement began following Serials crisis which resulted in reduction of library budgets Maximization of profit margin by publishers Increased need for universal availability of publications Marginalization of authors in the scholarly communication process

Introduction Free access to scientific information Propelled by the development of the World Wide Web (WWW) Supported by ICT infrastructure and the Internet Meeting of the Open Society Institute in 2001 Budapest Open Access Initiative http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read Green – self-archiving in repositories Gold - use of open access journals

Introduction contd BOAI notes that open access to literature, means its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those

Open access opportunities for Africa Opportunities for developing countries Reduced cost on libraries Visibility of African research Wider dissemination of research reports Increased citation impact Enhanced global ranking of institutions Drives creation of institutional repositories

Interest of researchers is to share result of his/her findings Authors are interested in journals that will give wider visibility Universities and research centre need adequate ranking through wider visibility and research impact Readers are asking for universal availability of scientific publication Libraries are suffocating as a result of budget cuts

Challenges of OA publishing in Africa Funding Institutional Support Lack of awareness among researchers and authors Poor ICT infrastructures Lack of ICT personnel The question of power supply The rise of OA predatory journals Rip-off from publishers (Gold route model) Very low OA contributions from Africa

Predatory Open Access Journals Journals with serious questionable reputation Jeffery Beal tracks such journals and updates the list yearly Majority of the journals originate from developing countries (India & Nigeria) The journals claim very high journal ranking metrics List and other details Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open‑access publishers are available at http://beallslist.weebly.com/

Characteristics of Predatory OA Journals Prater (2017) identifies eight characteristics of OA predatory journals Request for submission fee (not publication fee) Very few members of editorial board or none at all Large number of journals from single publishers False promise of publication Very poor quality website (unprofessionally designed) Journal affiliation often does not match members of editorial team Some spelling errors in abstracts and titles of papers Contents hardly relate with the scope of the journals

Gold route Open Access: A Rip-off? BioMedical Central and Public Library of Science (PLoS) pioneered in 2002 Back to business using gold route model Gold route OA request for high articles processing charge The cost of publishing in some of the journals is as much as $3000 Only1 to 2% of eligible authors can publish article using the model (Bjork 2012).