Peripheral scholarship and the context of foreign paid publishing in Nigeria

Abstract

Lately, a phenomenal dimension of peripheral scholarship, compulsorily demanding the ‘foreign’, has evolved into the practice of paid publishing in ‘foreign’ journals among Nigerian academics. These ‘foreign’ journals afford speedy publishing at a fee with little or no peer review. This study is a descriptive research which collected qualitative data through 30 in-depth interviews conducted with academics in two federal universities in Nigeria. The findings established that though some universities are beginning to question their intellectual validity and propriety, predatory paid-for foreign journals remain popular among academics desirous to satisfy the ‘international publishing rule’ for promotion at all costs. Lacking international scholarly credibility, predatory journals will not advance Nigerian scholarship into the global scholarly mainstream which the ‘international rule’ ultimately seeks.