Quality,Access,and Voice in African Studies Publishing: Smoothing the Path to Bigger Changes

It was an honour to serve as Africa Spectrum's editor-in-chief. And it was a heck of a lot of work. Five hundred submissions a year, weekly editorial calls, conferences, production, administration, and budgeting. One could easily drown in these everyday tasks, and thereby lose sight of the bigger changes that matter.

As academics, we should constantly strive to deepen and broaden the knowledge base we create. As an academic journal, we should ask ourselves whose knowledge is published and who can read it. Finally, knowledge is not self-sustaining; it lives and breathes with those who share and receive it, and those who use it to induce change. In African Studies – understood as “transdisciplinary knowledge production concerning Africa or Africans” (Kessi et al., 2020: 272) – publishing must go beyond the tasks to be performed on a daily basis and reflect also on quality, access, and voice.

Quality

Africa Spectrum has witnessed a jump in its impact factor over the past few years and is now ranked the second-most esteemed African Studies journal worldwide. Over its decades-spanning history, it has thus successfully transitioned from a German-language niche journal to a globally renowned address (cf. Eckert, 2016). However, impact factor is just a number ¹ – one that has been criticised for a variety of reasons, including differences across disciplines as well as its fraught mathematical calculation (Larivière and Sugimoto, 2019).

Growing impact factors should, as such, not necessarily be conflated with increased quality. They do, however, help a journal garner attention from scholars and can lead to snowballing numbers of submissions (over 500 a year in our case!) (Gaston et al., 2020). Managing these constant arrivals initially drowned out other editorial tasks and the wider struggle for publishing equity (cf. Makulilo and Henry, 2024; Ssentongo, 2020).

To stem the tide, we decided to become much more demanding in what we moved to review in the first place. Those submissions we did go through were then scrutinised by a wonderful team of associate editors to ensure leading experts within their respective fields provided feedback on them. Such reviews have become more and more thorough as the journal's standards continue to grow (cf. Allen et al., 2019). While reviews are often criticised for being too subjective a means of checking academic standards (Baveye, 2021), it is the hard work authors put in to reworking their manuscripts, I believe, that leads to high-quality output.

Africa Spectrum's improved quality thus might be (coincidentally?) reflected in the impact factor increase. More importantly, it echoes the new rigour in terms of both demands and processes that we have established, as well as the efforts of reviewers and authors alike (cf. Starbuck, 2005). To use an old German cliché, Africa Spectrum promises its readers a Qualitätsgarantie: if you are looking for something African Studies-related to read, then you can trust that the articles featured in our journal have gone through rigorous prior checks.

The articles in this issue are proof of the journal's enduring quality. Agboga (2023) mixes qualitative and quantitative data to tackle the crucial question of why party switchers in Nigeria do not undermine the dominant parties; in this way, he calls into question alleged party erasure or party weakness in Africa. Czuba (2023) uses the breadth of his extensive qualitative work in Uganda to disentangle how the seeming incongruency of the country's political system is indeed a deliberate strategy elites employ to profit off of uneven state development. Agyemang et al. (2024) provide an extensive qualitative assessment of the widespread use of religious symbols in Gambia both under autocracy and since the transition to democracy. Clement Chipenda (2024; see also Marewo, 2023) finds that land-reform beneficiaries in Zimbabwe experience improvements not only in their productivity but also their welfare and well-being. Finally, Nyok (2024) studies the delicate social struggles originating from intermarriage between “freemen” and “slave descendants” in Cameroon. I stand in awe of these magnificent works and am humbled that the authors decided to publish them with Africa Spectrum.

Access

With the growing demands and rigours of the journal's selection process, our authorship has in no way become less diverse or less African ² ; hereby, we are contributing to more equal access to a key academic reward (Aboderin et al., 2023: 214). However, I have noticed during my time as editor that many African authors innovate beyond the standard research-article format, which might be due to the comparatively fewer financial resources available to many Africa-based institutions for extensive empirical work. This is primarily due to limited national research budgets ³ and unequal access to international grants (Africa Charter on Transformative Collaborations, 2023).

Within the larger African Studies struggle over just cooperation (cf. Mehler and Nyamnjoh, 2022), as a journal our role should be to widen “possibilities of knowledge created in/of/with/for the continent” (Kessi et al., 2020: 273) and combat multiple, often overlapping forms of under-representation (Amarante et al., 2022; Briggs and Weathers, 2016; Collyer, 2018; Lohaus and Wemheuer-Vogelaar, 2021; Ndlovu-Gatsheni et al., 2022). We have thus decided to elevate the standing of review articles, debate pieces, and analytical reports by sending them through the same rigorous process of double-blind peer review. In Africa Spectrum, they are often even more frequently read, cited, and publicly debated than our standard research articles and should thus be equally valued in academia, both in terms of career paths and the broader scholarly debate. The debate piece found in this issue (Serunkuma, 2024) is proof of such an “impact,” as it reached a triple-digit Altmetric score in just a week!

Opening the door to authors from diverse backgrounds is one important form of providing access. Additionally, letting readers then access this work “constitutes an important piece in the puzzle of addressing global asymmetries in knowledge production” (Grauvogel, 2022: 3). Africa Spectrum is published Open Access. I get lost in the various precious metals, minerals, and other geological phenomena publishers use as adjectives to diversify their channels of profit ⁴ – copper, gold, platinum, diamond, stardust – so let me put it in plain words: Africa Spectrum continues to be fully, entirely, utterly accessible. Anyone can publish with us without any article-processing charge (after passing peer review) and anyone anywhere can read each and every one of our articles whenever they so wish. Period.

Anyone? Well, any English-speaking, Internet-accessing, journal-searching reader. I wanted to change this. I failed. My aim was to make Africa Spectrum the first fully multi-lingual and multi-modal African Studies journal. ⁵ Every article was to appear in the predominant languages read in African academia (English, French, and Arabic) plus the most relevant vernacular as regards the article in question (say, Sango for a study of livelihoods in the Central African Republic's south, possibly even in a radio-ready oral version). Even with all the technological advancements that I had planned to take advantage of to this end, it was going to be an expensive undertaking – and our related grant application was quite simply rejected.

As one of my last deeds as editor-in-chief, I have changed the abstract policy to at least provide a glimmer of hope here: instead of the relict of having to provide a German-language abstract (unreflective of our global audience), we now ask authors instead to provide an additional French-language one as well as strongly encourage adding another abstract besides in an African language of their choosing. A small change. But hopefully one more step towards fulfilling the larger vision of bridging the many fossés between languages in African Studies debates (Bgoya, 2001; Mehler and Nyamnjoh, 2022: 369).

The doors are thus further ajar to our authors and readers alike. But who opens them, given we each have our particular positionalities, matters too. Following the decolonial act of “creating space for and ceding space to” (Kessi et al., 2020: 275), I am extraordinarily delighted to leave the journal in the hands of a larger and more diverse editorial team than Africa Spectrum has ever seen to date. I encourage you to take a look at the magnificent group of scholars from all over the world now at the helm. I am convinced they will open many more front doors, side doors, and even tear down the occasional wall.

Voice

Authors also entrust their hard work to Africa Spectrum with the hope that their message will be heard. And, indeed, “feminist [and, I would add, Africanist] writing and publishing is a key route to conscientization” (Mama, 2017) in a world where decision-making is often built on lies. Space is often found wanting for qualitatively grounded analysis; we have thus decided to increase the length of standard articles to a flexible 9,000 words (including references).

We have also gone to great lengths to improve our outreach activities. Some of this happens through social media channels, where our presence on X (Twitter), Bluesky, Facebook, and other such platforms has grown steadily. However, with social media channels drifting into muddy waters and consuming too much valuable time, personal links again become of great importance. We thus build on traditional newsletters and more strongly encourage our own networks – including the editorial board, editorial team, German African Studies Association (VAD), and authors themselves – to help spread the word far and wide.

We are also proud to give voice to critical reflections on the overall direction of African Studies. This is an ongoing debate, and as such we grant space for high-quality deliberation on related matters. In this issue, Yusuf Serunkuma calls into question the impact of Western institutions’ well-intentioned projects aiming at decolonialisation by contending that “the ‘global stage’ is actually a local stage of the Western world” (2024: 6). He thereby challenges prior Africa Spectrum debate pieces on the matter (Basedau, 2020; Iroulo and Tappe Ortiz, 2022; Ndlovu-Gatsheni et al., 2022). Heated discussion hereon continues, and we encourage you to contribute your own thoughts on where African Studies is at, should be at, and can go from here.

Thank you, Leo Arriola, for your guidance and countless early-morning (for you)/late-night (for me) virtual editorial meetings full of laughter. Thank you, Petra Brandt, for meticulously proofreading every line. Thank you, Houssein Al Malla and Jigneshkumar Patel, for your support with all manner of things. Thank you, Alena Thiel, Antje Daniel, Ken Opalo, Martha Johnson, and Gordon Crawford, for leading the review process. Thank you, Sophie Donnelly, Zahra Ahmed, Kamlesh Joshi, and S.M. Amudhapriya, at SAGE for the professional publishing. Thank you, reviewers. Thank you, authors. Thank you, readers. Please believe me that these thanks are no mere Floskel, signs of politeness, but come very much from the heart.

Martha and Maxine Rubin are now steering the ship; Alena, Amanda Coffie, Antje, Elias Phaahla, Henrietta Nyamnjoh, Hye-Sung Kim, Jignesh, Ken, Lamine Doumbia, Petra, Seulgie Lim, Symphorien Ongolo, and Yousra Abourabi are their more than capable crew. As they sail to new horizons, the prevailing wind finds itself blowing them steadily on their way.