Abstract
When the Department of Education - now the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) - replaced the 'SAPSE-110' higher education funding system with the 'New Funding Formula' (NFF) in 2004, it is unlikely that they imagined it would give rise to an entire new industry within university administrations: the management of journal and book publication outputs by academic committees and by research support departments. Yet this is exactly what happened. What also happened was a dramatic rise in research publications and the graduation of students with master's and PhD degrees. Charles Sheppard of the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University gathered data from the DHET's HEMIS (Higher Education Management Information System) and provided the overview of research outputs shown in Figure 1.
Highlights
Publication outputs increased by 18.9% between 2000 and 2004, by 30.7% between 2004 and 2008 after the New Funding Formula’ (NFF) had been introduced, and by a further 53.2% in the years between 2008 and 2012 – an increase of 250% over the entire period covered by Sheppard’s data
While the number of academic staff increased by 126% over the review period, the number of academic staff members with doctorates increased by 161%
Bawa and Mouton[2] advance several hypotheses, drawn from different sources, to explain the fall of productivity between 1991 and 1992, and again between 1995 and 1998 – but the implication to be drawn from the data provided by Sheppard[1] is that the decline continued through to 2000, initially rose slowly but gathered considerable momentum after the introduction of the NFF
Summary
Publication outputs increased by 18.9% between 2000 and 2004, by 30.7% between 2004 and 2008 after the NFF had been introduced, and by a further 53.2% in the years between 2008 and 2012 – an increase of 250% over the entire period covered by Sheppard’s data. Comparative data for the periods prior to 2000 are not found, but Bawa and Mouton[2] published the publication outputs for the years 1990 to 1998 (Figure 2).
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