by ecancer reporter Saira Ahmed

Scientific research in Africa is constantly suffering due to high article processing charges (APCs) and publication fees, writes Juliet Nabyonga-Orem in an editorial published in the British Journal of Medicine.

There seems to be a great imbalance between high quality research coming out of the developed world and Africa, with Africa contributing only 1.3% approximately to the global publication output.

This situation is further made worse, when we look at the number of full-time researchers at a local level in low-income countries and compare it to the number of full-time researchers in a high income country; 5 per million people in low-income countries versus 363 per million in high-income countries.

This disparity is caused by several underlying and deeply imbedded issues: In low-income countries there is weak investment in research and academic writing capacity both financially and educationally, governments do not fund research enough which makes it hard for African researchers to fully invest in their scientific research and usually they have other part-time jobs to cover their expenses.

With such a financial situation, paying high publication fees or article processing charges is not possible for them and hence limits the scientific potential of such countries.

Dr Nabyonga-Orem notes that “at the global level, there are exploitative international research collaborations, gender constraints affecting female researchers and inability to attract global research funding.”

She further highlights that, “Now, APCs are systematically excluding African researchers from publishing in high-impact open access journals. Researchers in Africa are typically not in a position to win or have access to grants that cover APCs as eligible research expenditure.”

Thus, the only option left for researchers from low-income countries is either to self-sponsor their studies or acquire international funding which may be exploitative or not relevant locally.

This adversely impacts the public health and the economy of that country as local demand is not being met by the research sector and patented drugs being imported from outside the country can have a heavy cost.

“A 2018 analysis showed that countries of the WHO African region received only 0.65% of global research grants,” writes Dr Nabyonga-Orem.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case relevant only to Africa; studies show that in Pakistan, only 2% of researchers had received more than two research grants 15 years after doctoral training.

Many open access publishing models requires authors to pay for the publication of their articles which can then be accessed freely by researchers.

Although this makes the dissemination of new research easy and equitable, it adds a financial burden onto either the publisher or the author.

Research grants can pay for publishing, but as mentioned above a very meagre amount of global research grants make their way into low and middle-income countries.

High fees need to be paid to get published in high-impact open access journals and although sometimes partial or full fee waivers can be given to authors from low-income countries, it does not solve the problem entirely.

Fee waivers based on the per-capita income of a country are not a viable solution because this income does not reflect that country’s financial investment in scientific research and also because this limits global collaborations; if even one author of a paper is from a country with high-income the discount cannot be obtained.

Low salaries of health researchers in African countries further impede their publications from making it into high-impact journals and more often than not, they are forced to publish in low profile journals or infrequently.

To overcome these issues urgent reforms are required; fair and equitable opportunities must be given to researchers from low and middle-income countries.

Dr. Nabyonga-Orem calls upon governments, funders and donors need to play their part by investing in health research, and supporting researchers with grants, and remunerating them as appropriate.

Secondly, the fee discount and waiver policies of open access scientific publishers need to incorporate considerations of capacity to pay.

Finally, the author argues that there is a need to diversify the range of high-impact open access journals available to African researchers, as an essential pillar of ongoing efforts to decolonise academia (and global health).

Reference: Nabyonga-Orem J, Asamani JA, Nyirenda T, et al Article processing charges are stalling the progress of African researchers: a call for urgent reforms BMJ Global Health 2020;5:e003650.

ecancermedicalscience’s submission criteria have recently been refined to only accept articles which feature at least one author from a Lower and Middle Income Country (LMIC), or which have a significant impact on under-resourced settings. This decision has been taken in order to focus the journal's resources on proactively supporting authors from LMICs, where the majority of new cancer cases will occur over the next two decades, and the global collaborations that are vital to the development of key skills in this area.

ecancermedicalscience runs a ‘pay what you can afford’ model for APCs and will never let financial issues be a block to publishing.