AFRO-NETS> Publishing from Africa

Publishing from Africa
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Ken Carargo and I are developing a paper concerned with the difficulty of
access to journals in developing countries (Ken is from Brazil), and the
difficulties of having papers published from developing countries. I was
wondering if you could provide some information concerning the availability
and access of journals in Africa. Also, many of our friends express a
concern of the under-representation of developing countries in the leading
journals such as the BMJ, Lancet and NEJM. We have found, for example that
<1% of all research articles are from developing countries. There are many
reasons for this, and we want to scientifically explore these. If you have
any data or anecdotes concerning the difficulty of publishing from Africa
it would be appreciated.

We have gotten now some rejection rates by country for the BMJ and the
Annals of Internal Medicine, and the rejection rates does not seem to be
substantially worse than for developed countries, suggesting that this
probably cannot explain the differences, but rather many fewer papers are
submitted from developing countries per capita of scientist suggesting that
the submission rate may explain in part the lower rate of articles in the
leading medical journals.

If you are interested in participating in this effort, it would be great.
We would plan to put this up on the Web with everyone getting credit as
well as to publish this as well.

We are looking to see if you have some data from your country concerning
access to journals, and data concerning the problems of publishing, rather
than general feelings as to what the problems may be, if possible. It
might be easier to carry out the dialogue with Ken and I rather than the
general list, however, this may be a topic that people want to discuss...

So, the basic question is what data are there to examine the lack of
journals in developing countries, and the difficulty of scientists in
developing countries to get published in the journals which have the
highest circulation/citation index.

Thanks

Ron LaPorte, Ph.D.
Dept of Epidemiology
University of Pittsburgh
mailto:RLAPORTE@vms.cis.pitt.edu

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