"I would like here to respond to the "Call for Papers" from the University of Lagos (Unilag) that asked prospective authors to also send money. During the accreditation visits (which are really meticulous and rigorous), I found that while quite a number of colleagues are doing serious scholarship, the overwhelming percentage is engaged in what you call "Vanity" journal (and book) publishing. Every department–100 PERCENT–that we evaluated had its own "journal" which is "edited" in-house. Thereafter the authors literally put a gun on the head of administrators to count those "publications" as part of the percentage of scholarship that can be locally published. Even Colleges of Education and Polytechnics have departmental journals in Nigeria–there was a CFP from one of them on this list recently.
None of these "journals" is indexed, either locally or internationally; so, colleagues who live/work five kilometres away from the institutions may not even know that such publications exist. Some institutions have been posting some of their publications online to give them visibility and possibly generate citation counts. There are claims (I have no proof; it wasn't my charge) that some of the articles are plagiarized or may even be exact copies of papers published elsewhere with a new author and institutional affiliation"
- Okey Iheduru
Read the rest...
- Ikhide
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