Debating Ideas reflects the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing engaged, often radical, scholarship, original and activist writing from within the African continent and beyond. It offers debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments books. It is edited and managed by the International African Institute, hosted at SOAS University of London, the owners of the book series of the same name.
As Trump turns on university after university in the United States, it is hard to keep up with the increasingly Kafka-esque accusations and shocking institutional capitulations. The philosopher Judith Butler is just one of many at the University of California whose name has been shared in an investigation into alleged antisemitism. Her own work has long highlighted the conditionality of academic freedom. In a piece published in 2015, she writes about this conundrum:
‘we are dependent on a funded infrastructure to exercise academic freedom at the same time that academic freedom requires protection against the incursions by those very funding sources into the domain of teaching, writing, and scholarship’.
Butler describes this as ‘a knot of interdependency and dependency that cannot be overcome’. What happens, they ask, when there is no funding, and the ‘infrastructural conditions for the exercise of rights become impossible’?
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This conundrum faces universities both rich and poor. The Trump administration’s war on public and private universities weaponizes federal funding to impose his political agenda. Across much of Africa, universities are similarly dependent on limited, and unpredictable, state funding, and Vice-Chancellors are often political appointees.
Whether in the US or Africa, defending academic freedom relies on institutional resources, which in turn depends on states funding those institutions. This has particular implications for publishing freedoms. Academic publishing cannot be done on the cheap. It relies on resources, infrastructures and expertise: support for editors, journal software, institutional repositories, university presses. These capabilities are hard to sustain in persistently underfunded institutions, especially when the priority is teaching ever larger numbers of students.
African intellectuals have long been aware of this funding conundrum. In the 1980s, African higher education was sent reeling from IMF-imposed structural adjustment programmes (SAPs). University presses were particularly hard hit. Many closed or became little more than print-shops. African journals and publishers turned to international NGOs for funding. Whilst some supported ‘local’ journals, donors often prioritised support for ‘philanthropic’ access to reading and publishing in global journals. The funds fostered a new form of intellectual ‘extraversion’ rather than building endogenous publishing capabilities.
The first conference on African academic freedom, hosted in Kampala in 1990 by CODESRIA, came at the nadir of these cuts. In his reflections in the ensuing volume Academic Freedom in Africa, the Ugandan political scientist Joe Oloka-Onyango captured this African conundrum: how could the continent’s intellectuals survive between the ‘rock of the shrinking and increasingly illiberal African state and the hard place of donor-conditioned research funding’. If academic publishing is integral to institutional autonomy, what happens when this ecosystem is repeatedly undermined, financially and politically?
Thirty-five years later, African universities now have to reckon with the commercialisation of academic publishing. As Paul Zeleza points out, knowledge production is increasingly dominated ‘by Western publishing houses and ranking systems’. Digitisation and the shift to an Open Access ‘author-pays’ business models have transformed the global research economy. With their academics looking to publish in indexed journals, African university librarians prioritise ‘international’ journal subscriptions rather than supporting their own journals. The costs of institutional subscriptions to Scopus and a ‘bundle’ of Elsevier journals are a major commitment. Whilst the precise figures are commercially sensitive, they vary from $5,000 and $100,000, depending on the journal bundle, whether the ‘deal’ has been negotiated by a national library consortium, and the size and status of the university itself. With ‘international’ journal subscription and APC costs continuing to mount, home-grown institutional journals are not a priority.
Some of the richer African universities – including Makerere, Strathmore and Cape Coast, as well as several in South Africa – have also bought Elsevier’s ‘Digital Commons’ platform. This platform offers both a digital repository and an institutional publishing ‘solution’ and binds African universities even more tightly into the Elsevier data-analytics ‘ecosystem’.
AI licensing deals are a new source of revenue for publishers like Taylor & Francis, which publishes more than 70 African focused journals, and has a particularly strong presence in South Africa. Like Elsevier, Taylor & Francis is one of the ‘big 5’ publishing ‘oligopolies‘. It too is skilled at developing new markets and making universities dependent on their publishing services.
From Dar es Salaam to Legon, cash-strapped African universities instead have turned to free open source software, such as the OJS (Open Journals System) platform. Yet without dedicated financial and technical support, there is a constant risk of what developers call ‘technical debt‘: the initial choice of software and support can make it harder for its users to keep software and platforms up to date. Web platforms and publishing protocols rapidly evolve, but retaining skilled software developers is expensive. There is also the risk of journal dormancy, as editors struggle to attract reviewers, sustain submissions and feed publishing workflows, especially if their journals have not been globally indexed.
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Even where universities provide funding and technical platforms for their own journals, the speed with which digital publishing technologies has evolved makes it hard for open-source software technologies to compete. The generation and dissemination of granular and high-quality journal metadata is key to journal discoverability. The largest publishers promote their own one-stop submission platforms and data-aggregation services, all with the aim of creating a detailed citation ecosystem.
Attacks on academic freedom rightly dominate the headlines. News that Harvard Educational Publishing pulled a special issue of Harvard Educational Review on Palestine generated outrage. The insidious impact of commercial publishing models on African academic knowledge production may be less visible, but it too undermines everyday publishing freedoms. If an African publishing industry is integral to the continent’s intellectual ecosystem then this sector needs to be actively defended and supported. The conundrum remains.
David Mills is Director of the Centre for Global Higher Education at the University of Oxford. His most recent book, coauthored with colleagues in Ghana, is called Who Counts? Ghanaian academic publishign and global science
