From DOUGLAS CROSS
Martyn Kelly’s lament for his rejected but relevant paper (Forum, 2
January) echoes the experience of so many professional scientists working
abroad.
Sadly, the lack of local academic finance and equipment in many developing
countries makes hard field data a product of enormous value. Visiting and
local consultants recycle almost any data at enormous rates, often regardless
of their quality. At a couple of conferences in Asia last year, casual distribution
of even basic field-gathered water quality data resulted in my being instantly
mobbed by research students and (especially) their professors (and stern
rebukes from the conference organisers about releasing such material before
publication, because it would immediately be published under the names
of new authors in local journals).
As a consultant ecologist, in the past three years I have ‘published’
nine reviews, analyses and databases. Most of these would have earned local
ecologists good master’s degrees, but not a single one was in a ‘respectable’
international journal – with no budget for such luxuries, the people who
urgently need access to such data would never see them.
Publishing in local journals allows information-starved local workers
to develop their own capabilities, and to build on this work when the foreign
consultants have all gone home. Putting data into consultant’s reports is
a wonderful way of ensuring that they will get plenty of circulation in
the country itself; any data with any value at all will be extensively recycled,
and quoted far more widely than any rigorously scrutinised paper in a ‘respectable’
international learned journal. So Martyn Kelly’s decision to publish his
paper in a local journal, and let his CV look after itself, is entirely
the right one. It is totally unimportant if someone else plagiarises our
work – the developing countries need reliable data far more than we need
respectable CVs.
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Douglas Cross Honiton, Devon
