Academia is Now an Obstacle to the Advancement of Science

Some might argue that researchers have become so embedded in a narrow academic agenda, they seem to be in the thrall of an addictive narcotic, reliant on the dealer to provide the high—prestige.

As a recovering addict, I must admit, I was a part of this system for so many years I thought/taught of it as the only possible way academia could work.

Let me put this into context. As a Black woman in South Africa, I was only too happy to be among the first black women to get a PhD and become a university lecturer in my field, focused on doing well and making sure that the people who supported me did not regret it (otherwise known as imposter syndrome). And I wholeheartedly believed, as many still do, that as researchers and scientists we were tackling challenges in the right way and making progress. I was working on green industrial processes and later the improvement of crops, and I thought that political will and greedy commercial entities were the only barriers keeping us from solving society’s problems.

But as I became more involved in projects helpful to communities that were near me, I began to see that such work was barely recognized by the university—never mind rewarded. This led me to ask deeper questions, even to consider leaving the university. In parallel, I was engaging more in open science.

I realized that we in academia are a part of the problem—and maybe even one of the biggest factors—limiting the advancement of science. Because, currently, at best, academia and academic research function like a commercial enterprise/capitalistic system, where the most important things are profit for publishers and prestige for researchers.

Although there are several systematic challenges within academia, I am particularly interested in those related to scholarly communication and publishing.

A researcher applies for a grant from a government or development agency for a project to solve a challenge in the community, country, or region. Upon the success of the application, this academic feels as if they won the lottery. This is until they sober up to the realization that now they must develop the solutions they have proposed and come to terms with the fact that the funding is not going to their bank account. This is where things start to get dicey.

Instead of communicating these possible solutions to the communities facing the challenges, the researcher writes a complicated report, intentionally choosing words that are difficult to understand, so that they appear knowledgeable to three people (editor and reviewers)—maybe a few more readers if they are lucky. This creates a perception of excellence and thus prestige, but even if the research has generated useful information, it will be repeated by the same group of elites, with a slim chance of reaching the public or affected communities.

The other critical issue with academic and scholarly publishing—with the exception of diamond open access, or repository systems in which authors and institutions do not pay to publish or read—is a serious lack of equity and inclusion. Exclusionary practices, like article processing fees, disproportionately affect authors from the Global South, especially Africa.

A recent analysis done by Hussein et al (2024) estimated that publishing open access (which makes the information freely available to readers) costs an author on average $2,500, which is nearly impossible for Low/Middle Income Country (LMC) researchers. This means the open access movement, which aimed to make knowledge freely available, has been hijacked to make the opportunity to contribute knowledge exclusive to those who can afford it.

To address this, we need to answer key questions: Is the academic/scholarly publishing domain exacerbating current inequities that are inherently racially discriminating and a colonial past disguised as quality? Can we accept that academics from marginalized communities have an equal right to contribute—even a greater right if you consider the resource constraints they face and the need to address past inequities? When will academic publishers accept languages other than English or regional solutions outside the global North? Will indigenous knowledge ever be truly valued?

The issues of a publishing system that incentivizes narrowly targeted modes of communication and provides inequitable access are particularly important to researchers living in the Global South. The African Open Science Platform (AOSP), for which I serve as deputy director and lead open access activities, is working hard to address these issues with regional and global partners.

The AOSP, which was first proposed by the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation, National Research Foundation, and their partners (the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) and the International Science Council (ISC)) around 2015, is an advocacy and diplomacy platform established to create opportunities for African scientists, positioning them at the cutting edge of data-intensive open science projects. Consistent with UNESCO’s 2021 Recommendation on Open Science, AOSP engages and advocates for the continent through a network that stimulates and amplifies the impact of scientific research and provides the African scientific community a shared purpose and collective voice consistent with open science principles.

AOSP’s pilot phase ended in 2018 with a study that reinforced the need to establish, promote, support, and scale open science activities on the continent. Because addressing access and contribution for African scholars will increase the visibility their research, thus making vast knowledge available to the research ecosystem to drive more research discoveries, the study identified equitable forms of scholarly outputs as a particular focus. To cover specific regional priorities, AOSP appointed regional nodes through an open competitive process. Three regional nodes are currently active: the African Institute for Capacity Development (AICAD), which will focus primarily on open data; the East African node based in Kenya, which concentrates on climate- and disaster-related programs; National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences (NARSS), the Northern African node, based in Egypt; and UbuntuNet Alliance, the Southern Africa node, based in Malawi, which currently works on open access and related training.

Through a partnership between UbuntuNet Alliance and the AfricArXiv, we are spearheading work to promote open scholarly communication. The initiative, launched in late 2023, aims to create community collections of research performed on the continent using the AfricArXiv repository platform to archive, disseminate, and make the outputs discoverable. To accomplish this, UbuntuNet Open Science Cloud began hosting a space within AfricArXiv in April of 2024 that makes all outputs (journal publication, peer reviewed or not, training material, presentations, videos, etc.) accessible to researchers, funders, institutions, and the public. Parallel to this, AOSP has conducted training for researchers (both virtually and in-person in a number of countries) on the importance of using equitable open access models in addition to Open Science Dialogues, in which we discuss what open science means for different stakeholders’ countries and share open science practices and initiatives. In addition, the AOSP trains researchers to translate their research into local languages and to present it in a journalistic style, so that it can easily be consumed by the public.

However, more work is needed before we can reach equity of scientific participation and knowledge at scale. My challenge to all involved in the academic project is in these questions: Can we fundamentally rethink the way scientific research is conducted and shared? Can we wean ourselves off the narcotic of prestige? Can we create systems of scholarly communication that meet the needs of researchers as well as readers outside the elite? Should we even publish journal articles as they are now? Or should we adopt a style of communication more like that of newspapers or social media, targeting the outlets through which the public consumes most of its information, in as many languages as possible?

This suggestion may seem far-fetched. But if the goal is equity, inclusion, and social benefit, the current approach will never get us there.

References

Haustein, S., Schares, E., Alperin, J.P., Hare, M., Butler, L.A. and Schönfelder, N. (2024). Estimating global article processing charges paid to six publishers for open access between 2019 and 2023. arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.16551.