Browsing by Author "Gray, Eve"

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Access to Africa’s Knowledge: Publishing Development Research and Measuring Value
(LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, 2010-02-15) Gray, Eve
This paper reviews, critically, the discourse of research publication policy and the directives of the regional and global organisations that advise African countries with respect to their relevance to African scholarly communication. What emerges is a readiness to use the concepts and language of the public good, making claims for the power of technology to resolve issues of African development. However, when it comes to implementing scholarly publication policies, this vision of technological power and development-focused scientific output is undermined by a reversion to a conservative research culture that relies on competitive systems for valuing and accrediting scholarship, predicated upon the systems and values managed by powerful global commercial publishing consortia. The result is that the policies put in place to advance African research effectively act as an impediment to ambitions for a revival of a form of scholarship that could drive continental growth. While open access publishing models offer solutions to the marginalisation of African research, the paper argues that what is also needed is a re-evaluation of the values that underpin the recognition of scholarly publishing, to better align with the continent’s articulated research goals.
Book Reviews Compilation: Open Access Books on Open Scholarly Communications
(LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, 2010-02-15) Rens, Andrew; Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl; Williams, Kevin; Gray, Eve
Editors' Comment
(LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, 2010-02-15) Abrahams, Lucienne; Gray, Eve
The Neo-Colonial Political Economy of Scholarly Publishing: Its UK-US Origins, Maxwell’s Role, and Implications for Sub-Saharan Africa
(LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, 2021-05-31) Gray, Eve
The prevailing dynamics of today’s global scholarly publishing ecosystem were largely established by UK and US publishing interests in the years immediately after the Second World War. With a central role played by publisher Robert Maxwell, the two nations that emerged victorious from the war were able to dilute the power of German-language academic publishing—dominant before the war—and bring English-language scholarship, and in particular English-language journals, to the fore. Driven by intertwined nationalist, commercial, and technological ambitions, English-language academic journals and impact metrics gained preeminence through narratives grounded in ideas of “global” reach and values of “excellence”—while “local” scholarly publishing in sub-Saharan Africa, as in much of the developing world, was marginalised. These dynamics established in the post-war era still largely hold true today, and need to be dismantled in the interests of more equitable global scholarship and socio-economic development.