AFRICAN JOURNAL PARTNERSHIP PROJECT

Proposal from the Council of Science Editors

BACKGROUND:
Biomedical journals in the developing world face many obstacles to providing critical medical information to local health practitioners and research scientists. There is also an urgent need to establish or strengthen a research culture that emphasizes scientific inquiry and experimentation that results in quality writing and reporting of research findings in scientific publications. Three NIH components, the Fogarty International Center (FIC), National Library of Medicine (NLM), and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), plan to participate in building capacity through collaborations between medical journal editors in the northern hemisphere and in sub-Saharan Africa, which enable the journals to be accepted into MEDLINE.

Despite the recognized benefits of medical journals to health practitioners, Africa’s medical journal production and distribution are low and therefore do not make research from endemic areas available to colleagues on the continent or in the international scientific community. According to a survey conducted by the WHO, there are about 66 medical journals on the continent, less that a third of which are published regularly. Compared to those of other continents, African medical journals are poorly represented on international indexing services. Medline now indexes 28 journals from Africa (although it is not clear how many of these are medical journals). With such poor representation, medical research reported in African journals is not readily available even on the continent.

Biomedical journals in the developing world occupy a unique niche. They provide research relevant to local situations that would not be published in international journals. Developing country journals encourage aspiring researchers and provide a forum to enhance publication skills. In addition, many developing country journals serve as an important resource for continuing medical education and, because of their lower cost, may be more accessible to healthcare professionals in impoverished areas.

There has been recent interest in supporting the improvement of the quality of African medical journals by several established medical journals, organizations, and institutions. In October 2002, the World Health Organization (WHO) sponsored a meeting/workshop in Geneva to address this problem. A specific outcome of this Workshop was the formation of the Forum for African Medical Editors (FAME) made up initially of 12 African medical editors (both Anglophone and Francophone). WHO is a major sponsor of FAME. Other organizations, institutions, journals, and associations present also offered various forms of assistance.

The National Institutes of Health (National Library of Medicine, the Fogarty International Center, and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences) sponsored a meeting in September 2003 in London, hosted by the British Medical Journal. The objective was to discuss the partnership of four African medical journals with five well-established northern hemispheric medical journals as a mechanism to enhance the quality of the African journals. The African medical journals were chosen because the journals are in countries that have active NIH-sponsored research and are part of the communication network developed by NLM for the Multilateral Initiative on Malaria.

In the first phase, the following partnerships have been established: In the second phase (2008), the following two more African journals were partnered with western Journals;
OBJECTIVE
With FIC, NLM, NIEHS, and CSE, partners from northern hemisphere journals and journals in sub-Saharan Africa will work to assist in addressing the following identifiable weaknesses among the African journals:
  1. Few resources and funding for publication and management (e.g., technological infrastructure such as in-house desktop publishing, knowledge of building journal websites, presence of a managing editor).
  2. Undeveloped production and marketing skills (e.g., maintaining a sustained publication schedule, distribution including electronic distribution).
  3. Inadequate capacity for peer review and evaluation (e.g., difficulties in maintaining an anonymous peer review system, cultural beliefs that make criticizing more senior researchers difficult, and lack of a qualified and willing pool of reviewers).
  4. Uneven quality of manuscripts submitted (e.g., uneven writing skills and inherent difficulties of performing research in a developing country environment).
  5. Reluctance of local authors to publish in their journals due to citation index issues, perceived inferiority to international medical journals, and an author’s belief that publication in Northern hemisphere medical journals may facilitate more rapid career development.
OVERVIEW OF TASKS
  1. Identifying equipment, facility, and infrastructure needs.
  2. Identifying editorial needs.
  3. Providing hardware (computers, printers, scanners, etc.) and computer software as well as initial training to editorial office personnel.
  4. Providing author/reviewer training for African journal editors with training sessions open to FAME members.
  5. Helping establish business plans for African journals to ensure effective publishing operations and sustainability with training open to FAME members.
  6. Providing initial financial support for managing editor/business manager at each of the African journal publishing offices for the first year. Progress in developing a sustainable publication through revenue generation must be demonstrated to continue funding for an additional one year.
  7. Identifying needs and supporting online publication of African journals.
  8. Establishing internships for representatives of African medical journals at northern hemisphere journal offices.
  9. Commissioning of systematic reviews on topic relevant to sub-Saharan Africa.
  10. Tracking of indicators of success of the capacity building initiative.