Bridging the North-South Divide in Scholarly Communication: Threats and Opportunities in the Digital Era At the South-eastern Frontier: the impact of higher education policy on African research publication

Digital media, with their capacity to reduce the cost of information dissemination and to effortlessly cross borders, offer new possibilities for overcoming the marginalization of African research publication in the global community. In turn, Open Access publishing models show signs of generating substantially greater research impact and increasing citation levels, particularly for publications from the developing world. This paper will tackle a relatively neglected area of study- the policy context in which research publication happens in African universities. In particular, it will map the contradictions and distortions that occur when national research policy initiatives targeting development goals meet up with policies for publication reward systems that effectively drive publication – even of African Studies – out of Africa into the USA and Europe. The context of the paper is a research programme that I am carrying out as an International Policy Fellow in the field of Open Information Systems in the Open Society Institute. This is a qualitative study, exploring research and research dissemination policy and practice in South Africa and comparing this with other African countries. African policy and practice will in turn be criticall