Blogs

The British journalist George Monbiot has written a powerful article in the Guardian newspaper calling for an end to paywalls in scientific research. Below is a particularly enjoyable snippet on the origins of the paywall journal system:

“Everyone should be free to learn; knowledge should be disseminated as widely as possible. No one would publicly disagree with these sentiments. Yet governments and universities have allowed the big academic publishers to deny these rights. Academic publishing might sound like an obscure and fusty affair, but it uses one of the most ruthless and profitable business models of any industry.

The model was pioneered by the notorious conman Robert Maxwell. He realised that, because scientists need to be informed about all significant developments in their field, every journal that publishes academic papers can establish a monopoly and charge outrageous fees for the transmission of knowledge. He called his discovery “a perpetual financing machine”. He also realised that he could capture other people’s labour and resources for nothing. Governments funded the research published by his company, Pergamon, while scientists wrote the articles, reviewed them and edited the journalsfor free. His business model relied on the enclosure of common and public resources. Or, to use the technical term, daylight robbery.

As his other ventures ran into trouble, he sold his company to the Dutch publishing giant Elsevier. Like its major rivals, it has sustained the model to this day, and continues to make spectacular profits. Half the world’s research is published by five companies: Reed Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Wiley-Blackwell and the American Chemical Society. Libraries must pay a fortune for their bundled journals, while those outside the university system are asked to pay $20, $30, sometimes $50 to read a single article.”

For the full article, visit the Guardian newspaper here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/13/scientific-publishing-rip-off-taxpayers-fund-research.

This post has first been published on Afroscientific.com

Nigerian Neuroscientist Mahmoud Bukar Maina discussed his research into the state of Neuroscience in Nigeria (“Putting Nigerian neuroscience research under the microscope” – The Conversation Africa).

He outlines some of the key challenges Africans face in bringing our continent to the main table of state-of-the-art scientific resesrch. The following is an excerpt:

“Researchers are working hard to unravel the complex mysteries of the human brain and nervous system, as well as to find treatment for often incurable brain diseases. These neuroscientists are mostly based in Europe, the US, Japan and China. So most of our understanding of the brain comes from the global North, with only minor contributions from places like Africa.

That’s not to say neuroscience isn’t being researched across the continent. But there are huge barriers to innovation and productivity.

Most universities do not have equipmentfor scientific research. And where research is happening, it’s often being carried out using outdated equipment. The lack of reliable power across large stretches of the continent is another issue. This makes it difficult to acquire, use or store common materials used in biomedical research such as antibodies and tissue samples.

For neuroscience, a number of local and international programmes are trying to address these shortcomings. For example the International Brain Research Organisation and the International Society for Neurochemistry have invested in the training of many scientists across Africa. Not for profit bodies like Teaching and Research in Natural Sciences for Development in Africa and Seeding Labshave helped in setting up laboratories in some African countries. Such efforts have helped to boost the neuroscience skills of scientists in many African countries.

But this hasn’t yet levelled the difference in scientific output between researchers in Africa and those in the “global North”. Perhaps bridging this gap and identify methods that could boost the continent’s neuroscience capacity, requires more knowledge about scientists’ challenges and strengths in different countries.

With this in mind, my colleagues and I set out to examine the state of Nigerian neuroscience. By analysing more than 1,200 neuroscience extracted publications from PubMed, a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, we found that Nigerian neuroscience research has its own strengths and shortcomings.”

Read full article at Conversation Africa here.

This post has first been published on Afroscitentic.com