One academic submitted 125 journal articles and 30 conference presentations for subsidy last year. That is an article every three days. Another author claimed seven books in a single year.
Nobody creates science at that pace, even if ChatGPT is doing the writing.
Yet South African taxpayers pay universities for it.
The figures come from Johann Mouton’s CREST team, which tracks how the publication subsidy is gamed.
On 9 October, Minister Buti Manamela signed Communique 3 of 2026, stating plainly that gaming of the Publication Output Subsidy “has reached such levels that the department must intervene”. From May 2027, the department proposes to:
Cap the number of publications a single author can claim, with disciplinary differences;
Refuse subsidy for articles in predatory, hijacked or delisted journals, and for books from vanity and author-owned presses;
Restrict claims for student publications;
Allow visiting fellows to claim only if they co-author and declare all other affiliations; and
Deny subsidy for plagiarism, salami-slicing, gift authorship and paper-mill products, and blacklist repeat offenders.
Consultations with research managers follow before year end, and some are already muttering that the game is up.
How knowledge dissemination became a publications market
When the post-apartheid funding formula came in, research productivity was low. Paying for accredited publications was a blunt lever, but it worked. Subsidy units rose from 7,230 in 2005 to 25,982 in 2024. The research output grant was R5.8-billion in 2025/26, and a single-authored article earns its university about R130,000.
To drive this income, many universities made publication a performance indicator and paid staff bonuses for publishing. In a 2020 study, Evelyn Muthama and I found that only Rhodes University and the University of Cape Town did not pay any form of commission. The sums are large: at Fort Hare, an independent assessor found more than R86-million paid into academics’ personal accounts between 2014 and 2019.
The department’s 2015 policy warned against “directly incentivising individual authors” because it promoted “perverse behaviour”. The warning was ignored. The communique now notes a “strong correlation” between gaming and high individual incentives. Mouton says the problem is concentrated in just a handful of the 26 public universities.
As one of our participants put it: “Whether you are publishing in a journal that has high impact factors or low… here we don’t care about that. What we care is whether that journal gets the university money.”
Use value, exchange value and your taxes
A journal article should have use value. It should share knowledge, get read, argued with and built upon. But it also has exchange value as a countable unit traded for money, promotion or a better spot in the rankings. The problem is that exchange value often eclipses use value entirely.
Through this lens, every game on the department’s list makes sense. Salami-slicing is rational if it’s only the number of papers that counts. Predatory journals flourish when nobody cares whether an article is read. When an article is worth more than R100,000 of taxpayer money paid to a university, nobody should be astonished that a publications market overtakes knowledge building.
Subsidy is meant to enhance knowledge for South Africa. An unread article in a hijacked journal is taxpayer money down the drain. So is a paper by a “visiting fellow” who has never set foot in the country but is paid for adding a South African university’s name to the byline. Much of that money ends up offshore, with such “fellows” and with publishers charging hefty fees.
Every rand spent on this is not spent on a laboratory, a library, a bursary or a junior lecturer’s research time. Meanwhile, colleagues with heavy teaching loads watch others earn bonuses for dubious output, and the reputation of South African scholarship suffers.
Ruffled feathers
For some institutions the subsidy is a revenue strategy, and the caps threaten this “business model”. We can expect the objections to arrive in respectable clothing: “caps punish productive scholars”; “students need to publish”; “international collaboration is vital”.
But caps don’t stop anyone publishing; they ask universities to choose which outputs to submit. And a host-department co-author and an honest list of affiliations is a very low bar for a genuine collaborator.
Universities submit audited claims, so somebody signed off on those hundreds of papers. As Mouton points out, that suggests either collusion or a blind eye. Blaming individual academics lets the institutions that drive the game off the hook.
Not everyone is rattled. Wits deputy vice-chancellor for research Lynn Morris welcomed the measures, noting that current policy paradoxically rewarded quantity over quality.
Hold firm, then go further
The department will face pressure to soften the caps, delay the start date and water down the rules on visiting fellows. It should not budge because the evidence, its own policy and the public interest are on its side.
But these measures treat symptoms. While the incentive remains, inventive institutions will find new ways to play games. The communique calls itself “the first step” towards recovering the subsidy’s “original intent”. The logical next step is to stop paying per publication altogether.
That must not mean taking R5.8-billion out of research; the sector cannot afford less research money. The point is to spend it differently: research time for early-career academics, supervision capacity, infrastructure, local open-access journals and engaged research that may change a community, a clinic or a curriculum. A few selected works, actually read by peers, would tell us more than a raw count.
The question should no longer be “how many papers did you get?” but “what knowledge did this money make possible, and for whom?”
The publication was supposed to be the means of sharing knowledge. Somewhere along the way it became an end in itself. The department has said, in writing, that the game is up. DHET, please don’t back down. DM
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