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Scholarly Communication, Open Access Publishing, and Research
Visibility in Nigerian and Sub-Saharan African Universities
Ifeyinwa. J. Udumukwu. PhD.
1
,Victoria Chukwu Nwali PhD.
2
1
Donald Ekong Library, University of Port Harcourt Rivers State
2
Ebonyi State University Abakaliki Ebonyi State
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51583/IJLTEMAS.2026.150600241
Received: 10 July 2026; Accepted: 15 July 2026; Published: 28 July 2026
ABSTRACT
Nigerian universities produce a substantial volume of research across disciplines such as agriculture, public
health, education, governance, and the humanities; however, much of this scholarship remains underrepresented
in global academic communication systems. This paper examines the structural conditions shaping scholarly
communication in Nigerian and Sub-Saharan African universities, with particular emphasis on open access (OA)
publishing as a mechanism for improving research visibility. Drawing on a systematic review of literature and
institutional data from OpenDOAR, African Journals OnLine (AJOL), and the National Universities
Commission (NUC), the study analyzes the effectiveness and limitations of gold, green, diamond, and bronze
OA models within the Nigerian context.
The findings reveal persistent barriers to OA adoption, including the high cost of article processing charges
(APCs), weak institutional repository infrastructure, the absence of coordinated national OA policies, and the
growing challenge of predatory publishing. These constraints collectively reduce the global discoverability of
Nigerian research and reinforce structural inequities in scholarly communication. Despite these challenges,
emerging opportunities are identified, including the expansion of AJOL as a continental OA platform, the
potential of diamond OA models supported by scholarly societies, and the strategic role of institutional
repositories in enhancing access and visibility.
The paper concludes by proposing a national OA strategy aligned with UNESCO’s Open Science framework,
emphasizing policy reform, repository mandates, and sustainable funding models to strengthen the visibility and
impact of Nigerian and African scholarship.
Keywords: Open Access; Scholarly Communication; Institutional Repositories; Research Visibility; Nigerian
Universities; AJOL.
INTRODUCTION
The paradox of Nigerian research visibility is well-documented in the literature: Nigeria is one of the most
prolific research-producing nations on the African continent, with over 157 federally and state-accredited
universities and a postgraduate research culture spanning all major academic disciplines — yet the overwhelming
majority of the research produced by Nigerian scholars remains invisible to the global academic community
(Onyancha & Ngulube, 2021; Omotayo & Ahiauzu, 2019). This invisibility is not a product of research quality
alone; it is a structural consequence of the political economy of global scholarly communication, in which the
dominant mechanisms of research discovery — Web of Science, Scopus, high-impact international journals —
were designed around institutional and financial conditions that systematically disadvantage scholars from
lower-income countries (Altbach, 2013; Boshoff, 2010).
The consequences of this invisibility are practical as well as symbolic. Nigerian policymakers who seek
evidence-based guidance on health, agriculture, education, and governance challenges are frequently driven to
cite international scholarship rather than the domestically produced research that is more directly applicable to
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Nigerian conditions — because that domestic research is difficult to discover, difficult to access, and not
organized within the bibliographic structures that policymakers and their advisers use to search for evidence
(Aina et al., 2019; Okafor & Njoku, 2023). Nigerian scholars face perverse incentive structures that reward
publication in expensive international journals — often at prohibitive personal cost — over publication in
African-based outlets that might better serve continental knowledge needs and knowledge users. And the global
academic community is deprived of the perspectives and findings that Nigerian scholarship would contribute if
it were adequately visible.
Open access publishing — broadly defined as the provision of immediate, permanent, online access to peer-
reviewed scholarship free of charge to the reader — represents the most systematically developed institutional
response to these structural inequities (Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2002; Suber, 2012). Yet OA
implementation in Nigeria has been uneven, contested, and complicated by institutional resource realities, the
predatory publishing crisis, and the absence of a national OA policy framework. This paper provides a critical
analysis of the current state and future potential of OA in Nigerian universities, drawing on Nigerian and African
library science literature and proposing a national strategy framework for improving the visibility of Nigerian
research.
Objectives
1. To examine the current state of scholarly communication and open access publishing practices in Nigerian
and Sub-Saharan African universities, with emphasis on institutional repository development and journal
accessibility.
2. To analyze the structural barriers affecting open access adoption and research visibility in Nigerian academia,
including APC costs, predatory publishing, and policy limitations.
3. To evaluate the effectiveness and suitability of different open access publishing models (gold, green,
diamond, and bronze) for improving the discoverability and global visibility of Nigerian scholarly output.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Research Visibility and Bibliometric Marginalization in Nigeria
Onyancha and Ngulube (2021) provide the most comprehensive bibliometric analysis of Nigerian research
output and visibility, drawing on Web of Science and Scopus data to document the systematic
underrepresentation of Nigerian university research in international citation databases. Their analysis finds that
while Nigerian research output has grown significantly in absolute volume since 2010, citation impact remains
low relative to output, and the proportion of Nigerian research accessible through major bibliographic databases
remains a fraction of total national research production. Omotayo and Ahiauzu (2019) focus specifically on
institutional repository development in Nigerian university libraries, documenting that fewer than 40 of Nigeria's
157 accredited universities maintain operational institutional repositories, and that among those that do, metadata
quality, interoperability with international aggregators, and content population rates are consistently inadequate.
The NUC accreditation framework has been identified by multiple scholars as both a driver and a constraint for
OA development in Nigerian universities. Omoba and Iwu-James (2020) argue that NUC's emphasis on
publication in internationally indexed journals — particularly Web of Science and Scopus-indexed outlets — as
a criterion for academic promotion and institutional accreditation creates structural incentives that divert
Nigerian scholars away from African-based OA outlets toward expensive international journals with high APC
barriers. This dynamic is self-reinforcing: the international focus of Nigerian academic promotion criteria
reduces investment in African-based OA journals, which in turn reduces their quality and impact, which
reinforces the preference for international publication.
Open Access Models and Their Nigerian Applicability
The four principal OA models — gold (author or funder pays APC for immediate open access), green (author
self-archives accepted manuscript in institutional or subject repository), diamond (no charges to authors or
readers, costs borne by institution or scholarly society), and bronze (publisher makes content freely readable
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without explicit OA license) — present very different cost structures and institutional requirements that map
differently onto Nigerian conditions. Okafor and Njoku (2023) provide the first systematic evaluation of OA
model applicability in the Nigerian university context, finding that the diamond and green routes are structurally
most suitable for Nigerian institutions while gold OA — the model dominant in European and North American
contexts following funder mandates — is largely inaccessible to Nigerian scholars due to APC barriers.
The APC economy represents the central structural barrier to Nigerian participation in gold OA. Morrison et al.
(2022) document average APC costs of USD $1,500–$11,000 for gold OA publication in high-impact
international journals — sums that typically exceed the entire annual research travel and publication budget of
individual scholars at many Nigerian universities. While APC waiver programmes operated by major publishers
nominally extend gold OA access to researchers from lower-income countries, Okafor and Njoku (2023) find
that Nigerian researchers encounter significant barriers in accessing these waivers, including complex
application processes, inconsistent publisher compliance, and, in several documented cases, outright failure to
honour approved waivers.
Predatory Publishing in Nigeria
The predatory publishing crisis — involving journals and publishers that nominally adopt OA APC models while
failing to deliver credible peer review, editorial oversight, or archiving — constitutes a particularly acute
challenge for Nigerian scholarly communication. Okafor and Njoku (2023) document that Nigeria consistently
ranks among the top source countries for papers published in predatory journals identified in Beall's list and its
successors, reflecting both the 'publish or perish' pressures of the NUC accreditation system and the limited
institutional infrastructure for helping scholars evaluate publication venue quality.
Omoba and Iwu-James (2020) find that early-career Nigerian scholars are disproportionately represented among
predatory journal victims, with dissertation-derived papers and conference papers particularly targeted by
aggressive solicitation emails. The reputational and career consequences of predatory publication — including
retraction, exclusion from legitimate scholarly conversation, and disciplinary proceedings — are documented in
the Nigerian context by Fabunmi and Asubiojo (2023).
Table 1.
Open access publishing models: definitions, cost structures, and applicability to Nigerian and Sub-
Saharan African institutional contexts.
OA
Model
Author Cost
Reader
Cost
Funder Model
Nigerian
Applicability
Example
Gold OA
APC $500–
$11,000+
Free
Author/funder-pays
Low – APC
barriers
prohibitive
without
waivers
PLOS ONE;
Nature
Communications
Green
OA
None (self-
archive)
Free
(repository)
Institution funds repository
Moderate –
requires IR
infrastructure
arXiv; DSpace;
Zenodo
Diamond
OA
None
Free
Society/institution/public
fund
High – no
financial
barrier to
authors or
readers
AJOL diamond
journals; SciELO
Africa
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Bronze
OA
None
Free
(limited)
Publisher discretion; no
formal OA license
Variable – no
licensing
guarantee
Selected Elsevier
free-to-read
articles
Hybrid
OA
APC within
subscription
journal
Free (OA
articles
only)
Mixed subscription + APC
Very low –
double-
dipping; high
cost
Springer Nature;
Wiley hybrid
journals
METHODOLOGY
This study employs a systematic literature review methodology, drawing primarily on Nigerian and African
library science literature supplemented by essential international scholarship. Database searches were conducted
on AJOL, LISTA, Google Scholar, Scopus (Nigerian-authored articles), the Journal of the Nigerian Library
Association, and the Nigerian Journal of Library and Information Practice using the terms: ("open access" OR
"scholarly communication" OR "institutional repository") AND ("Nigeria" OR "African university" OR "Sub-
Saharan Africa") AND ("research visibility" OR "bibliometric" OR "predatory publishing" OR "APC"). The
search period covered January 2015 to November 2024. Following deduplication and screening against
Nigerian/African focus and empirical or analytical engagement with OA in African academic contexts, 39
sources were incorporated in the synthesis. Institutional data on Nigerian university repositories was drawn from
OpenDOAR (2024) and AJOL's annual statistics report (2024).
The Current OA Landscape in Nigeria
Institutional Repository Infrastructure
The institutional repository (IR) represents the principal infrastructure through which green OA is
operationalized, and its development in Nigerian universities provides the most direct indicator of OA readiness
across the sector. OpenDOAR (2024) records 47 Nigerian institutional repositories as of November 2024,
representing a growth from 12 in 2015 — a significant expansion that nonetheless represents fewer than 30% of
Nigeria's accredited universities. Omotayo and Ahiauzu (2019) provide the most detailed assessment of Nigerian
IR functionality, finding that fewer than half of registered Nigerian repositories are actively populated — with
content deposited on a regular basis — and that metadata quality, standardization, and interoperability with
international aggregators such as OpenAIRE and BASE are consistently inadequate at most institutions.
The University of Ibadan, Obafemi Awolowo University, the University of Lagos, Ahmadu Bello University,
and Ajayi Crowther University represent institutional exceptions where IR development has received sustained
attention, though even at these institutions, the challenge of achieving comprehensive population — capturing
all or most of the institution's research output — remains unresolved. Omotayo and Ahiauzu (2019) identify the
absence of institutional OA mandates — formal policies requiring academic staff to deposit published or
accepted manuscripts in the institutional repository — as the single most significant factor explaining low IR
population rates. Without a mandate, deposit rates remain voluntary and low; with a mandate, international
experience consistently shows substantial improvements in IR content and discoverability.
AJOL and Continental OA Aggregation
African Journals OnLine (AJOL), founded in 1998 and headquartered in South Africa, represents the most
significant continental OA infrastructure for African scholarly publishing, and its role in Nigerian research
visibility deserves specific attention. As of 2024, AJOL hosts 74 Nigerian journals across disciplines including
library and information science, medicine, agriculture, education, and social sciences — a substantial portion of
Nigeria's indexed scholarly journal output. Approximately 61% of Nigerian journals on AJOL are available on
a full OA basis (AJOL, 2024), representing the most accessible channel through which Nigerian research
currently reaches international readers.
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Onyancha and Ngulube (2021) demonstrate empirically that AJOL-indexed Nigerian journals achieve
substantially higher citation rates than comparable Nigerian journals not indexed on AJOL, providing
quantitative evidence of the visibility premium that AJOL indexing confers. However, AJOL indexing itself is
not a guarantee of broader bibliographic discoverability: Nigerian journals indexed on AJOL but not also indexed
in Scopus, Web of Science, or Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) remain effectively invisible to the
majority of international researchers who rely on commercial database searches for literature discovery.
Advocacy for the indexing of high-quality Nigerian journals in Scopus and ESCI — through the quality
improvement investments in peer review, editorial standards, and metadata that these applications require —
represents an important complementary strategy to OA publishing for improving Nigerian research visibility.
Table 2.
Institutional repository status in selected Nigerian universities (OpenDOAR and institutional records,
2024).
Repository
System
OA Mandate
OpenDOAR
Status
Scopus/WoS
Indexed
Journals
Development
Stage
DSpace (UI IR)
No formal
mandate
Registered;
partially active
3 Scopus-
indexed journals
Established
DSpace
(UNILAG IR)
No formal
mandate
Registered;
partially active
2 Scopus-
indexed journals
Established
DSpace (OAU
IR)
No formal
mandate
Registered;
low deposit
rate
1 Scopus-
indexed journal
Developing
DSpace (ABU
IR)
No formal
mandate
Registered;
low deposit
rate
2 Scopus-
indexed journals
Developing
DSpace (UNN
IR)
No formal
mandate
Registered;
low deposit
rate
1 Scopus-
indexed journal
Developing
DSpace (ACU
Repository)
Under
development
Registered
None currently
Emerging
Institutional
platform
Partial
mandate
Registered;
moderate
activity
1 Scopus-
indexed journal
Developing
DSpace
No formal
mandate
Registered;
inactive
None currently
Early stage
Barriers to Open Access Adoption in Nigerian Universities
APC Costs and Economic Exclusion
As documented above, the APC economy represents the dominant structural barrier to Nigerian participation in
the gold OA model that prevails in European and North American academic contexts. Okafor and Njoku (2023)
estimate that fewer than 5% of Nigerian academic staff publish in high-APC gold OA journals without external
funding support, and that the proportion is lower still outside the STEM disciplines where international research
grant funding is most available. The Nigerian Research and Innovation Council (NRIC) and the Tertiary
Education Trust Fund (TETFund) the two primary national sources of research funding for Nigerian universities
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do not currently include APC payments within their eligible expenditure categories, creating a policy gap that
further constrains Nigerian OA publishing access.
Predatory Publishing and Reputational Risk
The predatory publishing crisis imposes both direct costs through wasted APC payments to illegitimate journals
and indirect costs, through reputational damage to Nigerian scholarship and the diversion of research output into
publishing channels that provide no genuine value-adding editorial or peer review services. Okafor and Njoku
(2023) estimate that between 2015 and 2023, Nigerian scholars collectively paid approximately $2.3 million
USD in APC fees to journals subsequently identified as predatory a substantial loss of research funding that
could have supported legitimate OA publication or IR development.
The NUC's accreditation criteria, which count publications in any 'peer-reviewed international journal' toward
promotion and accreditation requirements without adequate mechanisms to exclude predatory journals, is
identified by Omoba and Iwu-James (2020) as a key systemic driver of Nigerian predatory publishing
vulnerability.
Awareness and Policy Gaps
Beyond financial barriers, Omoba and Iwu-James (2020) document significant awareness gaps among Nigerian
academic staff regarding OA publication options, institutional repository deposit procedures, and the
identification of legitimate versus predatory journals. Their survey of 420 academic staff across ten Nigerian
universities found that 62% were unaware of their institution's OA policy (where one existed), 74% had never
deposited a paper in an institutional repository, and 58% could not correctly identify a predatory journal from a
list of publication options.
Library-led OA awareness and education programmes integrating predatory publisher identification, IR deposit
training, and OA licensing literacy represent an immediate and practical intervention within the existing scope
of library professional competence.
Table 3. Barriers to open access adoption in Nigerian universities, with severity assessment and proposed
responses.
Barrier
Severity
Nigerian-Specific Dimension
Proposed Response
APC costs
High
TETFund/NRIC do not fund
APCs; no national APC waiver
agreements
TETFund policy revision; NUC
negotiate national APC waiver
agreements with publishers
Predatory publishing
High
Nigeria among top source
countries for predatory journal
papers
NUC revise promotion criteria;
library-led predatory journal
awareness training
Absence of OA
mandates
High
No university or national OA
deposit mandate in Nigeria
NUC model OA mandate;
institutional IR deposit policies
at university level
Low IR awareness
Medium
74% of surveyed staff never
deposited to IR (Omoba & Iwu-
James, 2020)
Library OA roadshows;
embedded IR deposit training
in postgraduate induction
Metadata quality
Medium
Nigerian IRs have low
OpenAIRE/BASE
interoperability compliance
OAI-PMH standard
implementation; NUC IR
technical guidelines
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Promotion criteria bias
Medium
WoS/Scopus publication
required for promotion;
discourages African OA journals
NUC revise promotion criteria
to formally recognize AJOL-
indexed journals
Underfunding of IR
Medium
Most IR infrastructure
development relies on donor
funding or individual initiative
NUC recurrent IR funding line
in university budget
accreditation requirements
A National OA Strategy Framework for Nigerian Universities
Addressing the systemic research visibility deficit of Nigerian universities requires action at multiple
institutional levels simultaneously. This paper proposes a five-component National Open Access Strategy
Framework for Nigeria, drawing on the recommendations of Omotayo and Ahiauzu (2019), Okafor and Njoku
(2023), Omoba and Iwu-James (2020), and international OA strategy models. The framework is aligned with
UNESCO's (2021) Recommendation on Open Science, which Nigeria endorsed as a UNESCO Member State.
Component 1 — National OA Policy Mandate: The NUC and NRIC should adopt and enforce a national OA
mandate requiring the deposit of all publicly funded research outputs in institutional or designated national
repositories within 12 months of publication, modelled on the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) open access
policy and adapted to the Nigerian institutional context.
Component 2 — Diamond OA Journal Investment: TETFund and the NUC should establish a dedicated funding
mechanism for the development and sustainability of diamond OA journals operated by Nigerian and African
scholarly societies, prioritizing journals in disciplines of highest national policy relevance. AJOL should be
positioned as the primary national aggregator for diamond OA Nigerian journals.
Component 3 — IR Interoperability Mandate: All NUC-accredited universities should be required, as a condition
of institutional accreditation, to maintain operational institutional repositories that comply with OAI-PMH
harvesting protocols and COAR-aligned metadata standards, enabling international aggregation through
OpenAIRE, BASE, and AJOL.
Component 4 — Predatory Publishing Literacy: The NLA and LRCN should develop and disseminate nationally
standardized training materials on predatory journal identification and legitimate OA publication options,
delivered through library-led workshops integrated into all postgraduate research induction programmes.
Component 5 — Revised Promotion Criteria: The NUC should formally revise institutional accreditation criteria
for academic promotions to recognize publication in AJOL-indexed, DOAJ-listed, and other quality-assured
African OA journals on equivalent terms to Scopus and WoS-indexed international publications, removing the
structural incentive that currently drives Nigerian scholars toward expensive international venues.
CONCLUSION
The structural marginalization of Nigerian research within global scholarly communication circuits is not an
inevitable consequence of research quality differentials — it is an artifact of the political economy of academic
publishing, the inadequacy of Nigerian IR infrastructure, the perverse incentives of the NUC accreditation
system, and the predatory publishing crisis. Open access publishing, particularly through the diamond OA and
green self-archiving routes, offers a technically feasible and financially realistic pathway toward greater research
visibility for Nigerian scholars that does not require capitulation to the APC economy that dominates publishing
in the Global North.
The realization of this potential requires a coordinated national response encompassing policy mandates,
institutional infrastructure investment, revised promotion criteria, and library-led awareness and training
programmes. The five-component national OA strategy framework proposed in this paper provides a structured
starting point for this response, building on the existing work of AJOL, OpenDOAR, and the growing number
of Nigerian library professionals committed to improving the visibility of Nigerian scholarship. Nigerian
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scholars produce research of genuine national and international significance. The imperative is to build the
infrastructure — repositories, diamond journals, interoperability standards, policy frameworks, and professional
capacity — through which that research can be discovered, engaged, and built upon by the global knowledge
community it deserves to reach.
LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH
This study has several limitations that should be acknowledged. The research relies primarily on secondary data
and systemic literature review methodology, which, while appropriate for a mapping and synthesis study of this
scope, limits the depth of insight attainable into the lived experiences of researchers, librarians, institutional
administrators and policymakers engaged with open access publishing in Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa. The
absence of primary data collection through structured interviews, focus groups means that the barriers and
opportunities identified in this paper are derived from published accounts rather than from direct empirical
validation.
This constrains the ability to verify whether the structural challenges documented in the literature fully reflects
current conditions on the ground, particularly given the pace of change in Nigerian University and OA
infrastructural development.
Future research should address these limitations by incorporating primary data collection through qualitative and
mixed methods approaches. In-depth interviews and focus groups involving researchers, academic librarians,
publishers, institutional administrators and national policymakers would provide a more comprehensive and
practitioner-grounded understanding of the practical challenges associated with open access adoption in Nigerian
Universities.
Nationwide surveys of academic staff attitudes toward OA,institutional repository usage patterns, and predatory
publishing vulnerability would generate empirical data to validate the barrier framework proposed in this paper.
Such evidence would substantially strengthen the policy recommendations offered here and contribute to the
development of an evidence base for Nigerian OA strategy design that is rooted in the direct experiences of those
most affected by the structural inequities this paper has identified
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