A promising platform for Maldives’ scholars

It is heartening to see that things are progressing in Maldives in the area of scholarly communication. A major step has been taken by MaldivesResearch in this endeavour.

The first issue of the International Journal of Small Economies is planned to be published in November/December 2008.

This will be a promising scholarly platform for all the Maldivians who have the potential and yet lack the necessary means of publishing, most probably due to the long wait periods to publish in other international journals.

I am sure, in the past, there has been a number of initiatives like this to establish a journal for Maldivian scholars.

For instance, the Maldives College of Higher Education has had plans to establish a multi-disciplinary research journal. This plan has been there for quite some time. But action has not been forthcoming for reasons that I am unaware of.

The one incident that I am very familiar with is that of Maldives Journal of Health Sciences.
An editorial board was established in 2002 with the help and guidance of two academics from the University of New Castle, Australia. The editorial board was made up of qualified Maldivians and a great deal of an effort was put into it by all the members to get the journal going.

However, for some reason which was not clearly communicated, the journal did not get the official backing from the government. In general terms, the gist of the reasoning was that there was no guiding policy in allowing this kind of publication. That if the Maldives Journal of Health Sciences gets the approval, many others will start requesting for the endorsement to publish...

At the same time when these official communication was going back and forth between the relevant government authorities and the Faculty of Health Sciences, work was in progress in enticing the academics/scholars in the health sector to contribute to this journal as the editors was anticipating a positive response for the approval of the journal.

As things turned out, it was temporarily rejected by the government authority. However, keeping an ever optimistic mindset, after a lot of deliberation with other relevant officials from the College and the health sector, the editorial board decided to publish its first issue as planned. However, it was published as an internal document hoping for a positive outcome, from the discussion that was still ongoing with the government, in time for its second issue.

The first issue was published and distributed freely to the health sector and various sections within the College and work was in progress in compiling the second issue. However, there was a loud and definite signal that scholarly publication cannot be formally published, especially in a field like public health issues. This was discouraging to the editorial team as the credibility and visibility of the scholarly output is very much reduced. It was not unnatural that the work of the editorial board finally dwindled and faced a premature death before it reached its third year of existence.

Coming back to the point of this post, about the International Journal of Small Economies, I applaud the trustees and the editorial board for the selection of the name that does have a broad possibility of topics as well as authorship. And given its international outlook it has reduced the bureaucratic processes of approval and opened up for scholarly contribution internationally. And with a title like 'small economies', I am assuming, papers do not necessarily have to be predominantly on Maldives. A very promising journal.