Counter intuitive: The process currently practiced defies logic. Academic publishing depends on quality peer review. A published paper is one that has been seen and approved by at least two of your peers, usually from around the world. In Nigeria, this same published paper is subjected to pseudo-peer-review. At each stage of the promotion, your published paper (already peer-reviewed) will be accessed by senior colleagues in the Department, Faculty and University (three different assessment levels!!). This implies that a publication I had as a Graduate Assistant will be evaluated and scored about 6 different times after publication! What forms the basis of the new scoring - quality, content or what? Is the quality of the paper still being accessed after publication?
Breeds mediocrity: Many academic institutions in Nigeria do not consider the most important thing in academic publishing - quality peer review. This is currently a global issue. There are organizations around the world who will accept your paper for publication within 2 - 5 days provided you can pay the price. India and Nigeria leads in the number of such organizations per country. Desperate for promotion, after playing politics for many years, i can approach a local journal run by my friend or a foreign fake journal and get my article published. There are indeed organizations that hosts reputable journals and ensure they conform to the highest standards. They include: Clarivate Analytics and Scopus. Recently, African Journals Online (AJOL) started a rating system for African Journals. Nigerian Universities will not rank among the global best not because we do not do quality research but because we publish more in fake journals. Most local journals thrive on the local content policy in our promotion exercise. Many have not improved in quality as there is no pressure.
Waste of resources and time: For each stage of the evaluation (Department, Faculty, and University), there is the unavoidable printing of copies of credentials and publications due to corrections and formatting. For the senior cadres (Senior Lecturers, Readers and Professor), the same materials are usually sent to foreign researchers to evaluate! These are the same people who reviewed the works in the first place. We add the burden of our inefficiency to their already bloated workload of teaching, research, grantsmanship, peer-reviewing and editorship. How many foreign evaluations do Nigerian researchers receive in a year?
Deviation from global best practices: The publication aspect of our promotion in Nigerian Universities does not usually align with global best practices. For instance, it is generally accepted that advisors take the last authorship positions in a publication. However, our policies that first author get more marks has led to advisors fighting their students over authorship positions. Some institutions sets minimum number of volume in a journal your publication must be in to be acceptable for publication. A State institution only accepts your publication if it is in Volume 40 and above of a journal. If the whole world accepts this as the standard, will there be any new journal? Articles having more than four authors generally score less mark. These has reduced collaborations (which is what we actually need) among researchers and removal of qualified authors.
While the quality and quantify of publication is not the only criteria for promotion in Nigerian Universities, it remains the most significant. The other aspects which are teaching and community services are most often mandatory activities. We must improve on our current processes to accommodate only the best brains. It is understandable if we have developed these processes to cater for our local peculiarities, however, it is pertinent to reevaluate these processes in light of new information. Our institutions cannot be taken seriously with the way we promote mediocrity. This reflects in the various global rankings of academic institutions. Quality publication is not necessarily about funding; it is mainly about stretching the mind for excellent output.
