In the publish or perish environment of academia, getting papers into high-impact international journals is a metric for determining a researcher's performance and job prospects. But are South African academics legally allowed to sign over copyright, which is vested in them and in their institutions, to international companies? The international publishing houses, such as Elsevier and Springer Nature, are able to make careers by publishing an academic's work in their journals, which have high citations (in other words, research published in these journals will be cited in other academics' work) and global reach, but they also have tight control over the way in which the work gets disseminated and when.
Category: Articles
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