‘Publish or Perish’ in African Studies: New Ways to Valorise Research

Abstract

AbstractNew modes of publishing African Studies accelerate research, creating digital repositories, but valuing the outcomes is complex, and contested. For tenure of both librarians and academics, refereed publications remain the Holy Grail. Fears of quality decline accompany a rise in self-publishing and inverse social media brevity. Valuing works requires reliable sources, but permanency concerns remain: online news in Africa can quickly disappear, as evident with Ebola reporting; and if you trust Google, in African languages some news never occurred! But at the same time, new modes of publishing and communication allow wider review, and the contesting of canon. Twenty years ago, Africanists hoped open access credentialing was just around the corner. This has not eventuated but a measure of recognition is conceded as society itself goes online. Blogs and open access journals will not clinch jobs, but they can let scholars leave an imprint. Graduate digital courses with blogs replacing essays and completed projects offered back to libraries show a trend to capacitise a new generation of teachers, valorising research. Librarian job descriptions insist on digital skills. Granting bodies privilege the digital. Publishers go online. African studies associations hold digital workshops. If output in core media maintains centrality in ranking and citation then there is now a merging of forms. New books appear, some to acclaim, using digital sources, new knowledge discovery techniques emerge. Across all these trends, there will remain a need to balance digital and print collected by libraries, and refereed writing with more spontaneous communication, but their boundary is likely to narrow.