Publishing medical journals in resource-constrained environment: challenges and opportunities

Scientific publications play an important role in the scientific process by providing a key linkage between knowledge production and use. Publication of medical research findings in medical journals, serve as a foundation for scientific validation and dissemination. Hence, medical research must be published. Failure to publish or access important medical research findings would significantly affect the potential impact these findings will have on health and clinical practice. Medical journals serve as vehicles for disseminating medical research through publications. This will advance medical knowledge and improve patient care and outcomes. Publishing these journals require a rigorous process of peer review, which is meant to ensure scientific integrity and validity for these researches. Editors and reviewers act as gatekeepers and critics to scientific publications. Publication of scientific journals generally and medical journals in particular, in resource-constrained settings as obtains in sub-Saharan Africa faces enormous challenges. These challenges have resulted in low research outputs from these resource-constrained settings. The challenges include poor funding, poor staffing, poor distribution, editorship and peer review problems, authorship problems, poor sustainability, poor succession planning, rising costs of publishing, donors disinterest in supporting journals, plagiarism issues, lack of readership feedback, poor infrastructure, poor journal visibility and indexing amongst others. Some of these will be further highlighted. See the Download for more.