Sadly, the same cannot be said about scholarly publishing which to all intents and purposes continues to remain the flotsam and jetsam of the African publishing landscape. --

This work was conceived as a sequel to the African Writers Handbook (African Books Collective, 1999). It is built on the debates emanating from a seminar on scholarly publishing in Africa held in Arusha, Tanzania in 2002, organised by the Dag Hammarskj'ld Foundation, the African Books Collective and the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP). The seminar brought together scholars and publishers against a background of evidence of a revival of interest in higher education and scholarship in Africa after a long period of decline, and the new departures in scholarly publishing afforded by technology. This resulting collection of essays takes stock of the status of scholarly and academic publishing on the continent in the early years of the twenty-first century.

A range of perspectives on the complex political, philosophical, and pragmatic implications of opening research and scholarship through digital technologies. The Open Access Movement proposes to remove price and permission barriers for accessing peer-reviewed research work--to use the power of the internet to duplicate material at an infinitesimal cost-per-copy. In this volume, contributors show that open access does not exist in a technological vacuum; there are complex political, philosophical, and pragmatic implications for opening research through digital technologies. The contributors examine open access across spans of colonial legacies, knowledge frameworks, publics and politics, archives and digital preservation, infrastructures and platforms, and global communities.

Examining the role gender plays in African Studies, as practised in Africa and the US, this book discusses the challenges and difficulties female scholars face in their efforts to produce and disseminate scholarly knowledge. Beginning with an analysis of the structural and institutional barriers that affect women's productivity, it then examines the impact of the growth of women's presses, the promotion of feminist scholarship, and the productive links formed across the Atlantic, providing insight into the politics of cross-cultural race and gender.

Recent years have witnessed considerable speculation about the potential of open data to bring about wide-scale transformation. The bulk of existing evidence about the impact of open data, however, focuses on high-income countries. Much less is known about open data’s role and value in low- and middle-income countries, and more generally about its possible contributions to economic and social development. Open Data for Developing Economies features in-depth case studies on how open data is having an impact across the developing world-from an agriculture initiative in Colombia to data-driven healthcare projects in Uganda and South Africa to crisis response in Nepal. The analysis built on these case studies aims to create actionable intelligence regarding: (a) the conditions under which open data is most (and least) effective in development, presented in the form of a Periodic Table of Open Data; (b) strategies to maximize the positive contributions of open data to development; and (c) the means for limiting open data’s harms on developing countries.

For decades, university presses and other scholarly and professional publishers in the United States played a pivotal role in the transmission of scholarly knowledge. Their books and journals became the "gold standard" in many academic fields for tenure, promotion, and merit pay. Their basic business model was successful, since this diverse collection of presses had a unique value proposition. They dominated the scholarly publishing field with preeminent sales in three major markets or channels of distribution: libraries and institutions; college and graduate school adoptions; and general readers (i.e., sales to general retailers).Yet this insulated world changed abruptly in the late 1990s. What happened? This book contains a superb series of articles originally published in The Journal of Scholarly Publishing, by some of the best experts on scholarly communication in the western hemisphere, Europe, Asia, and Africa. These authors analyze in depth the diverse and exciting challenges and opportunities scholars, universities, and publishers face in what is a period of unusual turbulence in scholarly publishing.The topics given attention include: copyrights, the transformation of scholarly publishing from a print format to a digital one, open access, scholarly publishing in emerging nations, problems confronting journals, and information on how certain academic disciplines are coping with the transformation of scholarly publishing. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the scholarly publishing industry's past, its current focus, or future plans and developments.

A comprehensive evaluation of how to read African history. Writing African History is an essential work for anyone who wants to write, or even seriously read, African history. It will replace Daniel McCall's classic Africa in Time Perspective as the introduction to African history for the next generation and as a reference for professional historians, interested readers, and anyone who wants to understand how African history is written. Africa in Time Perspective was written in the 1960s, when African history was a new field of research. This new book reflects the development of African history since then. It opens with a comprehensive introduction by Daniel McCall, followed by a chapter by the editor explainingwhat African history is [and is not] in the context of historical theory and the development of historical narrative, the humanities, and social sciences. The first half of the book focuses on sources of historical data while thesecond half examines different perspectives on history. The editor's final chapter explains how to combine various sorts of evidence into a coherent account of African history. Writing African History will become the most important guide to African history for the 21st century. Contributors: Bala Achi, Isaac Olawale Albert, Diedre L. Badéjo, Dorothea Bedigian, Barbara M. Cooper, Henry John Drewal, Christopher Ehret, Toyin Falola, David Henige, Joseph E. Holloway, John Hunwick, S. O. Y. Keita, William G. Martin, Daniel McCall, Susan Keech McIntosh, Donatien Dibwe Dia Mwembu, Kathleen Sheldon, John Thornton, and Masao Yoshida. John Edwards Philips is professor of international society, Hirosaki University, and author of Spurious Arabic: Hausa and Colonial Nigeria [Madison, University of Wisconsin African Studies Center, 2000].