JSAA Vol. 10 Issue 2 is the first formal collaboration of the journal with SAASSAP; it is a guest-edited issue conceived and implemented under the leadership of Dr Matete Madiba, SAASSAP research and development officer and Director: Student Affairs of the University of Pretoria in South Africa and Dr Birgit Schreiber of the JSAA Editorial Executive.
This is an issue rich with papers reflecting the diversity of voices and issues in student affairs in South, Southern and continental Africa. It shows how African student affairs is still grappling with, reflecting on, researching, and writing about the #FeesMustFall student activism of 2015/16, the impact the 2020/21 COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, and other conditions that affect SAS practice, with a few towards theorising student affairs.
Most of all, this issue is a reflection of JSAA’s commitment to promoting collaborative research in student affairs. This issue in particular has a noticeable number of articles that are co-authored and/or based on collaborative research and the resulting co-authorship is becoming, one hopes, the standard. This is a trend that was described already by Hunter and Leahey (2008), who found that collaborations in research were on the increase, and that co-author prestige was higher than that of sole-author, and only male sole-authorship remained, at least at that time, most common. In healthcare research, for example, collaborative interdisciplinary research also enjoys higher publication rates of high quality than single authorship (Bruzzese et al., 2020).
Furthermore, this guest-edited issue is also a great example of collaboration in a further way in that it is made up of two parts: One part are the articles edited by the guest editor, Dr Matete Madiba, and the second part are articles from the open submission pool of manuscripts that were edited by the JSAA Editorial Team.
The journal is available open access at www.jsaa.ac.za and University of Pretoria journals. The full issue can be downloaded here.
