Ready to lead: what researchers across the Global South are telling us 

A committed, globally-minded research community is being held back by barriers at almost every stage of the research journey – and the tools to change that already exist. 

Today, around 60% of the world’s research comes from low- and middle-income countries. In Research4Life’s 25th anniversary year, Elsevier and Research4Life set out to listen to the researchers behind that shift, and to ask what full participation in global research would really take. 

The result is a new report, New horizons in participation: Strengthening research in low- and middle-income countries, built on a dual evidence base: a survey of researchers across 35+ low- and middle-income countries, designed with Research4Life’s Equity Committee and run by Elsevier, alongside an institutional leaders’ study led by ITOCA. Together they follow the full arc of research: funding, collaboration, publishing, peer review and visibility. 

One finding runs through all of it: willingness is high, opportunity is not. Researchers are ready to collaborate, publish, review and lead: about 87% want to serve as peer reviewers and 75% are interested in editorial roles, yet only 37% have been invited onto a board in the last five years. Nearly nine in ten say open access matters, but the cost of publishing shapes where most can publish at all. 

In her foreword, Laura Hassink, President of Elsevier Journals, puts it plainly: “Researchers in low- and middle-income countries are driven, internationally engaged and committed to contributing to global science, yet they continue to encounter barriers at almost every stage of the research journey.” For Elsevier, one of six founding publishers that joined the World Health Organization to launch Research4Life in 2001, these findings point to where publishers, funders and institutions can act: clearer routes into editorial and review roles, greater awareness of publishing support, stronger funding pathways, and equitable access to the AI tools now reshaping research. 

For Research4Life, the report marks a turning point. As Prof. Tandi Lwoga, Chair of the Research4Life Executive Council, writes, the task now is a shift “from access, to capacity, to full and equal participation. Twenty-five years after our founding, the measure of our partnership’s success is no longer how many researchers we reach, but how many now shape the research ecosystem from positions of leadership within it.” 

The opportunity this report lays out is to move beyond access, and help ensure researchers everywhere have the chance not only to reach knowledge, but to create it, shape it and lead it. This is work we can only do together – with our partners, and with the communities the report represents. 

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