The true cost of a research paper – Lessons for Nigeria

BY NEWS DESK, OCTOBER 14, 2025 | 01:50 PM

Alhamdulillah, excited to share the latest study from my lab, which is currently under review at one of our field's respected journals (this is the preprint version). In this work, we discovered a new mechanism that may be responsible for killing cells in certain forms of dementia caused by tau mutation.

The bulk of this research was conducted between 2024 and 2025 at the University of Sussex, thanks to funding from the Rainwater Charitable Foundation and the Alzheimer's Association, who collectively invested over $300,000 (over ₦400 million) in the project. This funding covered consumables, access to advanced equipment, and salaries for a research assistant and postdoctoral fellow, among other essential expenses. In essence, it cost over ₦400 million to produce this one publication. And globally, there are research projects where the investigations leading to a single paper have cost over ₦1 billion.

Think of it; the over ₦400 million invested in this study has not yet produced a cure. What it has done is help us understand one small but crucial part of how certain dementias damage brain cells. This knowledge now guides the next set of studies for my team and others, each of which will also require major investment before we can reach an effective treatment someday. This is why countries that want real solutions invest sustainably and continuously in research.

I want to share some key lessons for Nigeria based on this experience.

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Lesson for Funders: Close the Funding Gap

Nigeria’s largest competitive research grant, TETFund’s National Research Fund (NRF), is capped at ₦50 million and is presented as sufficient to support “serious science.” Yet, this single paper from my lab cost more than eight times that amount.

If Nigeria truly wants to solve its own challenges, especially in health, we cannot remain mere consumers of Western research. We must become active contributors. And to do that, research must be treated as a strategic investment, not an afterthought. Countries like South Korea and Singapore transformed their economies by investing heavily in research and innovation. Nigeria can do the same if it decides that knowledge creation is central to national development.

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Lesson for Institutions & Academics: Reward Quality, Not Quantity

In many Nigerian universities, promotion guidelines pressure academics to split one large project into several smaller papers just to increase “numbers.” Institutions therefore reward quantity over quality.

Internationally, what matters is credibility, impact, and recognition by peers. Many Nobel Prizes are awarded for a handful of landmark papers, not for long publication lists. For example, Professor Peter Higgs was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for theoretical work published in just a few short papers in the 1960s, which laid the foundation for the later discovery of the Higgs boson.

If Nigeria truly wants excellence, our institutions must reform promotion systems to reward impactful science. An academic who publishes in a top journal like Nature or Science should not need ten low-value papers to be recognised. This would raise the international credibility of Nigerian research and attract more global collaborations and funding.

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Lesson for Institutions: Encourage collaborations

Many Nigerian universities still penalise or undervalue papers with long author lists, assuming that too many authors dilute contribution. For primary research, this view is outdated and counterproductive.

Science today is inherently collaborative and interdisciplinary. It is common to see papers with hundreds or even thousands of authors, for example, in particle physics or genetics. A large author list doesn't weaken the papers; rather, it makes them stronger by combining expertise and resources. In my own paper, I included three undergraduate students, one MSc student, three postdoctoral fellows, and several senior collaborators. Each person's contribution strengthened the work. Excluding them just to shorten the author list for "points" would have weakened its credibility.

Our institutions must adopt global standards, where collaboration is encouraged and credit is based on impact, venue, and contribution, not on whether a paper has three authors or thirty. Embracing this mindset can attract meaningful partnerships and additional research support.

To conclude, I also want to highlight a misunderstood issue in publications. In most research-active institutions in the global North, authorship positions have clear meanings: • The first author is usually a junior researcher (PhD student, postdoc, or assistant) who carried out most of the experiments. • The last author is the project leader — the one who secured funding, set the vision, built the team, and oversaw the work.

In Nigeria’s system, however, promotion rules often give full credit only to the first author (or sometimes the first few). The leadership role of the last author is therefore misunderstood and undervalued.

In this paper, my mentee Zaid Muhammad is the first author, rightly so, as he carried out much of the experiments and brilliantly led other aspects of the work done by my undergraduate stuxents. My role as last author was to design the project, secure the funding, and direct the team. Yet, under some Nigerian promotion guidelines, Zaid would be considered the “lab leader” and given more points, while my contribution might be worth only one point. This discourages senior academics from mentoring properly. Aligning with international authorship standards commonly used in the global North would encourage mentorship and put Nigerian academia on a stronger global footing.

Overall, beyond funding, my opinion is that Nigeria must build a research culture that values excellence, not only by providing realistic funding that matches the cost of modern science, but by developing systems that reward impact rather than numbers, and that recognise collaboration and leadership as central to global science.

To read the preprint, follow: https://sciety-labs.elifesciences.org/articles/by?article_doi=10.21203/rs.3.rs-7713987/v1