Atueyi’s passing, Africa’s scientists and academic publishing

Asked in a 2016 interview what legacy he wanted to be remembered for, Ifeanyi Atueyi’s response was unequivocal. “I would want to be remembered for pharmaceutical journalism and for Pharmanews.”

Atueyi passed on recently at 85, a culmination of an eventful life that has been aptly captured in an autobiography – My life and Pharmanews – which this writer once compared with Richard Branson’s Losing my virginity, in terms of its simplicity, honesty and sheer capacity to enthral the reader.

Pharmanews is a tabloid, a pharmaceutical newspaper. It carries news and developments about medicines – from old to new and emerging. But it also shares information about those behind these developments in news stories and event coverage, opinion and feature articles, photographs, interviews, analyses and reviews. Instructively, since it was founded as a monthly in 1979, it has never missed a publication, a record in publishing in Nigeria by any standards.

It is understandable, therefore, that pharmacists in Nigeria have been thrown into intense mourning since Atueyi’s passing. The consensus is that he availed pharmacists and pharmaceutical scientists in particular, the platform to be heard, and on their own terms.

Pharmanews may not be a mass medium, but it has availed pharmacists an opportunity to engage, learn from each other and better appreciate and enhance individual and collective contributions to the never-ending quest to mitigate if not eliminate the scourge of disease and ill-health.

The dirges for Atueyi have been trenchant since his passing was announced. This is fitting. Atueyi’s transition gives both a metaphoric and literal meaning to the African saying that “The passage of the elderly is synonymous with a library set ablaze.” The gentleman was a treasure trove of knowledge which he continued to gather meticulously and systematically disseminate even while building bridges of friendship and love with generations of pharmacists and other health practitioners.

Atueyi had not planned on pharmaceutical journalism as a career. But once he got involved in it accidentally, it became central to his being. It was his life.

Pharmanews thrived and at different times, spun off a number of subsidiaries. Perhaps the most notable of these, was Pharmacy World Journal, a specialised scientific publication for pharmacists and pharmaceutical scientists. It provided yet another medium via which academics could publish papers that related to drug discovery and associated scientific areas.

Pharmacy World Journal adopted global best practice, assembling a distinguished editorial board, canvassing for submissions globally and ensuring that scientific papers were published only after rigorous peer reviews.

Unfortunately, however, the journal was not exempt from that scourge that afflicts academic publications in our part of the world – the profitability challenge. Though it made provision for advertisements in order to diversify its revenue base, advertisers were not much interested in its niche segment – academics. Even when it introduced a “page-charge”, that is, charging authors a fee for publishing their articles, the impact was negligible. The journal was inevitably discontinued, to the dismay of academics for whom it had been for years, a welcome medium with which to disseminate their scientific researches.

The plight of Pharmacy World Journal mirrors, to a large extent, the problem of scientific publishing in Africa. Indeed, according to the World Bank, Africa’s scientists are estimated to contribute only a meagre between 1.1 percent to 3.2 per cent to global scientific publications. This is of course, a reflection of the 1 per cent which Africa contributes to global research in general.

Such a marginal presence in global scientific literature perhaps explains to an extent the limited global focus on some of the pressing health challenges that are peculiar to Africans and blacks. Why, for instance, is prostate cancer more prevalent in Africans and blacks in general?

Some months ago, this writer challenged the Director General of the Nigerian Institute of Pharmaceutical Research and Development: Why does Nigeria continue to import drug excipients despite the relative abundance of research reports by Nigerian academics into local raw materials for drug manufacture? His response was multifaceted but highlighted inadequate government funding as a key challenge faced by the institute. The institute’s alternative European and American funding sources, on the other hand, were only keen on their own areas of research interest, naturally.

Africa’s scientists have often encountered challenges in getting published in top-rated journals, on account of such journals being very internationally competitive. Paradoxically, on the local side, many of Africa’s scientific journals are hobbled by inadequate funding, human resource and infrastructure challenges among others leading to poor international visibility and rendering them an unviable alternative medium for the continent’s scientists.

The need for more inclusivity in scientific publishing was ostensibly a motivation for the adoption of the Open-Access model by a number of academic publications.

The Open-Access model entails that journal publications by scientists are made accessible to everyone, which considerably broadens the visibility and accessibility of a scientist’s work. It is a direct contrast to the subscription-based model in which only those who have subscribed to a journal are able to access its contents.

However, the Open-Access model comes with a challenge, especially to Africa’s scientists: authors who desire their research findings to be published in top-rated international journals are required to pay an article publishing charge (APC) which could range from around $800 to as much as $5,200 or even more, amounts which are by African standards especially, exorbitant.

So, to a large extent, the double jeopardy for Africa’s scientists, desirous of publishing their scientific findings in respectable scientific journals worsens by the day.

Efforts are ongoing, nonetheless, to minimise these challenges. There is the Diamond Open Access scheme of publishing being championed by UNESCO for instance, which emphasises collaboration especially among academic institutions, communities and networks. The Diamond Open Access model of research publishing is being slowly domesticated on the continent by a number of NGOs in partnership with academic institutions. The Diamond Open Access model does not entail any charges on the author or reader.

Ifeanyi Atueyi’s passing provides the scientific community in Nigeria and elsewhere on the continent, an opportunity to revisit the continent’s place not only in global scientific publishing but also in global scientific research in general. In so doing, it challenges scientists to diligently examine how they can more adeptly work towards the mitigation of pain and disease, doing so in strategic collaboration with the rest of the world.

Africa’s pharmacists and scientists in general, need to become a lot more systematic in advocating for better funding for scientific research and education in general. Africa’s scientists must also look inwards and more deliberately pursue ethical scholarship. They must increasingly seek ways by which researches are inclusive but also transparent and result-driven. This way, the pioneering efforts of titans like Ifeanyi Atueyi in local scientific publishing would not have been in vain.
Okoruwa works for the Communications Consultancy, XLR8.

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