We Write Better Together: E-mentoring to Induct Developing Country Researchers into Scientific Literacy Practices

This paper describes the design and implementation of an e-mentoring programme to support early career and less experienced researchers from developing countries improve their scientific abstracts prior to submission for the International HIV/AIDS Conferences. An evaluation study was conducted on the impact of this programme over two conferences. Results from the evaluation show that distance learners improved their motivation, knowledge and skills of abstract writing, with the support of a template for scaffolding, mentor feedback, and an open access toolkit for self-study. They also overcame barriers such as lack of access to opportunities to learn an essential skill for scientific professional development. Based on this innovation, I consider the implications for reimagining universities, workshops and conferences as collaborative capacity-building spaces, via the use of Web 2.0 technologies. There is an urgent need for more and better research from the places where the issues and challenges of scaling-up health treatment, prevention, and care are being tackled currently, as they can impact the strengthening of health systems (Zewdie et. al, 2008). However, junior scientific, clinical, and social researchers who work in resource-limited settings often lack both 'hard' resources, such as basic laboratory equipment, and 'soft' resources, such as rigorous mentoring in research design and writing. They thus find it challenging to disseminate their research at international, peer-reviewed conferences and in journals. This group of professionals comprises not only scientists and clinicians, but also advocates, activists, community workers and social counsellors working in various disciplines. The situation is complicated by the lack of investment in improving national research systems (Kirigia and Wambebe, 2006), which inhibits the emergence of a research culture. In addition, training workshops on scientific writing in developing countries are not effective in producing writers because instructors focus more on the product rather than the process of writing, a cause of the limited understanding of learning as the mere transmission of procedural knowledge. Plagiarism and a lack of awareness of the ethics of research are rife in scientific writing from developing countries. Given these obstacles, many early career researchers are left low in morale, wondering when and if they would ever experience success in the 'publish or perish' academic culture. As the custodian and convenor of the International AIDS Conference, the International AIDS Society (IAS) is tasked with enhancing access, widening participation, and increasing the quality of HIV research carried out by researchers from resource-limited settings. I was working at the …