Abstract:

Open Access academic outlets have become meters of scholarship ranking globally, but publishing through these gates remains a problem locally. With a special focus on academic publishing by African mass communicators, this study interrogates the open access. The key objectives of this study include finding out the number of Africa’s communication journals indexed in Open access Scopus platform; mine the data in the two global repositories and answer the question: how open are open access academic outlets. Applying comparative computational datasets and especially, content analysis, preliminary results showed that less than 5% of both indexers contain Mass Communication journals, compared to the sciences, engineering and others. Curiously, publications by Africa and subscriptions by the continent’s higher institutions are similarly low. The study concludes that the negatively skewed presence of local journals and articles in global open access databases should worry Africa’s higher institutions in the face of global competition for upper ranking. It recommends urgent convening of conferences, seminars and workshops on global open access offerings with a view to increasing awareness and usage among all Universities in the continent.