Angela Okune: During the discussion, Sulaiman Adebowale observed parallels across the continent where many academic scholars began to set up journals, largely due to a decrease in the spaces where they could publish as a result of the Bretton Woods structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s:
"As academic scholars in their desire to get published and the limited spaces for them to get published...we all know how that happened over the years from the 80's downwards and the death of the university presses and the funding allocation funding problems and well, basically the birth of some commercial publishers interested in scholarly publishing at that time and how towards the 90's...you all saw information technology as a tool to break out of that mode of operation to disseminate. And, and it's all across the continent, this collective academic initiative to set up journals," (31:35).
Sulaiman notes with interest how these initiatives then move from the need to share, the need to publish, the need to disseminate towards commercial models of operation in a way to sustain those journals.
