The surge of scientific papers during the coronavirus disease 2019 crisis has been followed by stagnation in academic publishing, with high rates of reviewer refusals, delayed editorial and review cycles, and increased rejections overall due to large backlogs. While many journals have suffered, the going has been especially tough for authors from the Global South. In modern times, the countries of the Global South – in Asia, Africa, South America, and Oceania – suffer from a weak research environment. Medical graduates have limited integration of research techniques into the curriculum, except in places such as China, which have broken the mold. In some countries, such as India, where steps have been taken to usher in research at the graduate student level, sadly, students’ efforts are more focused on amassing papers to apply for Western residency matches, rather than to engage in indigenous discoveries. The brutality of a large population of patients to care for also makes balancing clinical training and research quite difficult, except in some premier medical teaching institutions. Likewise, relevant are the social pressures of becoming a doctor who treats and earns from a practice, rather than a researcher who works in laboratories or in relatively underpaid teaching jobs in public-sector medical institutions. It would be prudent to say that research and publications in the Global South are the domain of a privileged few who can balance the demands of family and society with a tenured position in selected medical institutes. Once the physician–scientist from a low- to middle-income country overcomes these initial social and educational barriers to academic publishing, comes the steeper climb of dueling with the journals. As the publishing industry has transformed with automated submission systems and, more recently, with generative artificial intelligence (AI), the number of manuscripts submitted has increased manifold.1 It has become increasingly difficult to find genuine expert peers to review scientific content, and editors have had to resort to quick reviews by novices. The problem has been augmented by the advent of AI, which generates peer reviews devoid of nuance but is being increasingly used to keep pace with submissions. In such a scenario, much of publishing has become a matter of “networks” rather than of content. It is here that researchers from the Global South are at a complete disadvantage. Editorial boards of 1st-quartile (Q1) journals are dominated by researchers from the West, and although most claim fairness in the screening of submissions, experience tells us a different story.2,3 It is far easier for a physician–scientist from a reputable laboratory in the US or Europe to push through their ideas in a top-tier journal, aided by familiar editors who continue to pursue reviewers and allow multiple revisions. Researchers from the Global South do not enjoy the same privileges. There have been instances when we had the unsavory experience of reviewing for some high-impact journals where editors had made up their mind to publish a paper because of its origin from a top research group, and no amount of pointing out methodological issues could convince them otherwise. Another curious case was serving as a reviewer for a systematic review published by a leading group, which was based on a similar systematic review from the same group a few years earlier, with very little additional evidence and similar conclusions. Needless to say, an author from the Global South would receive a rejection email stating the lack of novelty of the idea, with a gentle nudge to submit to a fully open-access (OA) sister journal, a practice adopted by many publishers nowadays. Interestingly, in the garb of OA and free-to-read research, there are high article processing charges (APCs). One would think groups from the Global North are better placed to bear the APCs, but publishers tend to direct too many from the Global South to OA journals. Often helpless and trying to impress local educational administrators who are too metric-driven, such authors have to bear the expenses themselves, thereby facilitating more unethical practices. Two common strategies have come up – to include a Western author as a gift author to bear the APCs or to team up with tens of other gift authors from the developing world who would each contribute part of the APC. Neither improves the morality of academic publishing. The lack of research funding in much of the developing world has led to a couple of other problems. Colonial science, also called parachute science, is an exploitative practice where researchers flush with funding, mostly from the Global North, collect and analyze data from low-resource countries.4 With much of academia waking up to true parachute science, a variant has emerged in which local researchers, desperate for high-impact publications, are made the face of collaboration but are at the mercy of the Western lead regarding author positions, role descriptions, and sometimes even data rights. Another issue is that of researchers having completed their postdoctoral training in developed laboratories returning to their native countries in the Global South, creating extension laboratories for studying problems of the developed world – all for the sake of collaborative papers in which their ex-mentor groups are inevitably a part. Both of these stall efforts to tackle problems that actually bother the Global South. Finally, high-end journals have embraced technologically advanced work, which may be beyond the reach of authors from the Global South, simply because of the equipment being unavailable. They have to settle for lesser options. We would like to point out that good science is not only published in gatekeeper journals but also in mid- and low-impact ones, and that great science may be simple without resorting to technological one-upmanship. Much of the developing world lacks the electronic medical records to the extent found in the US, Europe, and Japan. Large dataset research, hence, inevitably comes from select countries rather than from Asia, Africa, and South America. However, since the Global South accounts for a larger share of the world population, the importance of smaller, real-world studies cannot be overstated. Smaller studies, in fact, provide more granular data through close observation and avoid the “averaging science” of dataset research. It would be wrong to blame editors for all that is awry in academic publishing. Editors, after all, are also humans, and humans seek familiarity while making burdened decisions. Acknowledging the challenges that researchers from the Global South face, we at the Journal of the Indian Academy of Geriatrics are determined to encourage submissions on geriatric problems that matter to the developing world. Authors from the Global South are encouraged to submit on issues of local and national health importance. The onus of discoveries of relevance to lower-income countries lies as much on journals from the developing world as on individual researchers.
Chakrabarti et al. (Wed,) studied this question.