This article was posted on the African Doctoral Lounge list on Facebook. Here, below, is my response on that forum.
If you're a junior scholar in the Western academy or in Africa but have career aspirations outside the continent, it would be suicidal to follow this author's example or advice. As he states, he has already established a career and has gotten to the peak of that career by publishing in reputable peer reviewed venues.
Secondly, his current stance is an ideological one, targeted not at the peer review process per se but at the practices of big corporate journal and book publishers who exploit and profit from academics' labor. He has a point there, and scholars have been complaining and debating about this reality forever. The answer, however, is not to embrace vanity and predatory publishing without peer review. Alternative, collaborative and more equitable credit-sharing and access-democratizing publishing models have been proposed and are gradually emerging. Not happening fast enough, but it's only a matter of time. I edit the flagship journal of my field and I know that the issue of access control and hate keeping has dominated our conversation.
The challenge is to come up with a win-win in which access is guaranteed without killing the non-profit and for-profit infrastructure of publishing or the quality control mechanism at the heart of peer review protocols. One model that a couple of serious new journals in Nigeria have come up with is to implement rigorous peer review and then charge a publication fee post-acceptance, only if the paper is accepted. Then the papers are published open access. The publication fees keep the journal funded and functional and available to all but peer review is not compromised.
On Sat, Feb 6, 2021 at 10:35 AM Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:
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