Nigeria produces a great deal of research. Getting that research seen, cited and respected on the world stage is a different problem — and one that AUST and the Raw Materials Research and Development Council (RMRDC) have now set out to tackle directly. The two institutions have agreed to revive a national scholarly journal aimed at raising the country’s global research visibility, nominating Favtoma founder and AUST President Engr. Prof. Peter Azikiwe Onwualu as Editor-in-Chief.
The barriers being targeted
The plan confronts the practical obstacles that quietly throttle Nigerian scholarship:
- Gaps in indexing on Scopus and Web of Science, which determine whether work is discoverable and citable internationally.
- Slow peer-review cycles that delay publication and, by extension, academic promotion.
- Weak publishing infrastructure that struggles to meet global standards.
To close them, the revived journal is to recruit international editorial board members and adopt digital publishing tools, with credible, internationally recognised indexing as the explicit goal.
Reputation as infrastructure
Onwualu’s argument is that journals of genuine international standing are not vanity — they are infrastructure. They underpin institutional reputation, lift national research output, and unlock the careers of academics whose promotion depends on visible, peer-reviewed work. A country that cannot reliably publish where the world is reading is a country whose ideas travel poorly.
The journal sits within a broader AUST-RMRDC partnership that also includes proposed raw-materials testing centres across Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones — pairing the dissemination of knowledge with the physical capacity to apply it.
It is a theme Favtoma recognises instinctively. Homegrown innovation needs a homegrown platform loud enough to be heard. Reviving a credible national journal is, in its own way, value addition applied to ideas — keeping the authorship, the editorial judgment and the prestige where the research was actually done.