Tag: FEES

Dr Ahmad Rufai is the Acting Dean, Faculty of Education, Sokoto State University. He was recently appointed guest editor for the special edition on Education for the South African-based Journal of Politics, Economics and Society (JPES).   Rufai tells ADEGUNLE OLUGBAMILA that it is unethical for a scholar to pay to get his works published in a journal. He also speaks on what it takes to produce a reputable journal.

Certain bodies request that potential contributors pay an amount to get their works published. Is this practice academic?

Reputable journals are not involved in such a practice. It is a despicable practice and is, unfortunately, a growing trend among academics in various parts of the world, Nigeria inclusive. Virtually, every Faculty in Nigeria has a ‘contractor’, who claims to be capable of assisting colleagues to get published once they pay publication fees which may range from $50 to $250.

Desperate lecturers with dead brains even pay more than that to get a substandard paper published in a substandard journal. We seem to be living in a dangerous academic world. It may interest you that several journals have published studies that are totally baseless and replete with cooked data all because the authors paid publication fees. A European journalist called John Bohannon, who is not a scientist, recently exposed this dimension of academic fraud after submitting a fabricated scientific study to 304 peer reviewed scientific journals which are all open-access between January and August 2014. The study was all about a molecule extracted from a lichen, as a potential treatment for cancer. He intentionally incorporated unscientific material to determine whether such foul play would be detected by the journals’peer reviewers. Alas, 157 of the 304 journals accepted the fake work for publication.

It is also observed that some teachers fraudulently cashed in on journals to move themselves up to professorial status. How true is this?

Yes, of course and that is a fast-growing trend. However, just as I stated earlier, different individuals have different levels of prestige or esteem.

So, when I come across professors including ISBN number of other books in the references of their own published books, I become amazed. And when I see them meandering between the concept of a lesson note and a lesson plan, in their journal articles, I smile! And again, when I come across publications where academic leaders erred in distinguishing between a research question and a research topic, I’m disturbed. So, I think it is wise not to keep bothering oneself about the substandard nature of the scholarship or research involved in some emerging academic leadership.

What is the essence of academic journals to the academia and individual contributor in particular?

Publishing in scholarly journals is integral to the job of an academic who is not expected to restrict himself or herself to teaching. Academic publishing is characteristically a product of scholarly research for there certainly cannot be a publishable material unless there is a research which itself is a path to knowledge sharing and experience dissemination. In other words, a good scholarly journal fulfills the role of a transmitter between an academic and his/her peers for it exposes his/her scholarship to them, especially with regard to emerging concerns or issues in his/her discipline and also avails them of the opportunity to subject such scholarship to peer assessment for the purpose of making it better and of merit, and with a view to accessing new vistas therefrom.

What are the attributes of an ideal journal?

An ideal academic journal, to my own mind, is one that does not publish materials that ordinarily should be committed to the dustbin.  It must have a well-articulated professional focus. Call it philosophy, if you like. What matters is that it must be a good specialised direction. This is without prejudice to the rising clamour for interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity. There also must be a solid peer review arrangement for quality control.

The peer review process is expected to be strengthened by a disciplined Editorial Board whose members should be qualified, competent, active and productive scholars. It should be pointed out that two editorial officers have challenging editorial role to play and, therefore, must be carefully selected. The Managing Editor, who normally, is the recipient of submission from contributors, wherever a sophisticated online system is not in place, should be scholarly and versatile for it is at his/her end that a preliminary decision is taken concerning whether a submission is worthy of being listed for peer review or not.

To review a journal, what are the procedures?

Once submissions are received by a journal through its Managing Editor, Assistant Editor or Editorial Assistant, a selection is made of the ones that comply with the guidelines as stated in the journal’s notes to contributors. A preliminary decision is taken at this state concerning which article should be submitted for peer review, subject to approval by the Editorial Board whose decision may be taken through an executive approval by the Editor.

Each paper is normally assigned to three experts who are tagged as Reviewer 1, Reviewer 2, and Reviewer 3. The reviewers, who must be familiar with the journal’s assessment criteria, are then contacted for notification on the assignment which must not offer any hint on the contributor’s identity. Once the reviewer consents to the assignment and the report submission deadline stipulated for feedback, the review process has begun. A paper is rejected if two of the three reports are negative. It is however returned to the author for correction if all the three reports are positive but recommend major or minor amendments or if, at least, one of the three is negative. Once resubmitted by the author after correction, the paper is reassigned to the same set of assessors for the second round of the review process.

The essence of this reassignment is to determine whether the amendments recommended by them have been effected by the author. In most cases, at least one or two of the reviewers spot few areas that should be further addressed by the author.

Unless, such additional recommendations are minor or insignificant and could, therefore, be addressed administratively by the editor (provided they are not structural or conceptual issues that an author may not consent to), the paper is, again,  returned to the author for re-correction. After final submission by the author, the Managing Editor or whoever fulfils his role, compiles a list of finally corrected submissions for final editorial decisions by the Board.

What mistakes do contributors make when submitting a journal?

Failure to prepare one’s manuscript according to the journal’s guidelines is a major mistake. Failure to consider the scope of a journal before sending one’s submission is another. More grave than the earlier two is failure of young scholars to learn and cultivate a good sense of academic writing, especially during their doctoral studies; before venturing into submitting their papers for consideration for publication in journals.

But journal managers too make their own mistakes. I recently received a review assignment from a notable Nigerian journal which failed to conceal the contributor’s identity.

The contributor was an Associate Professor from a Southeastern Nigerian university. Having been impressed with her work, I, two months after the appearance of her paper in the journal, invited her to contribute to a book project I was then coordinating. She promptly replied my email, stating the area she wanted to address in her research. I’m glad she never asked me where I got her email address. Alas! I got it through a “security breach” of a reputable Nigerian academic journal!