Photo: Eve Gray CC-BY

I would normally count the Easter weekend as a quiet time with little happening online. I was proved very wrong, to my delight. At the same time I was proved right on another front – the period of Open Access as a fringe activity, a protest from the sidelines, is definitively at an end. One reason that this pleases me enormously is that this changes definitively the largely futile game of global catch-up that research universities in Africa seem destined to play. If we really want to emulate the best practices of global scholarly publishing it is now very clear that open access publishing is something that we have to embrace. This is doubly good news, because open access offers African researchers, their universities and governments the opportunity to overcome the barriers that face dissemination of African research in its attempts to penetrate the dominant commercial scholarly publishing block. OA has the promise of real reach and impact – locally and internationally  – and it now has the unequivocal backing of major international organisations. But there is also going to be some work to do to ensure that the policies we develop conform to our own needs, not just those of developed countries.

So what did happen this weekend? First of all, UNESCO’s Information and Communication Directorate published its Policy Guidelines for the Development and Promotion of Access to Scientific Information. That UNESCO has launched an Open Access policy initiative is not news – it was launched to the end of 2011. I was familiar with the draft of the policy document from our discussions at the UNESCO Open Access Forum in November 2011, but it was good to have the final version in hand, one that we can use and cite and send to our colleagues and governments.

The Policy Guidelines, written with admirable clarity by Dr Alma Swan, are comprehensive, explicitly intended to inform the development of open access policies for scientific research by national governments. What is going to be needed now is active participation by African organisations, stakeholders, institutions and individual academics so that the policymaking process is really geared to the strategic goals that have been articulated for African research efforts. And, of course,  to ensure that these strategies are really aligned to our needs.

Then came the World Bank’s announcement of its Open Access initiative. It has created an Open Knowledge Repository as a one-stop shop for much of its information. An Open Access Policy will be applied from 1 July 2012, governing a range of World Bank publications and research outputs that will need to be in the Open Knowledge repository. This applies to monographs, chapters in monographs and journal articles as well as reports, with the former being deposited in their final pre-publication version. Peer review or review by project coordinators is required for all publications that are deposited.

The Creative Commons licence that has been adopted by the World Bank is the non-restrictive CC-BY that allows for copying, adaptation and distribution, even for commercial purposes. A non-commercial licence will govern only those works published by outside publishers –who will be required to comply with the open access policy.

I was just getting my breath back from these two major moves when the Guardian report on a Wellcome Trust announcement added to the seasonal celebrations. The Wellcome Trust is launching a new mega-journal, eLife, which will directly compete with the major scientific journals, like Nature and Science. One of the biggest research funders, with a strong commitment to the importance of applied research and its social and development impact, the Wellcome Trust was an early adopter of open access policies, requiring research outputs from the projects it funds to be deposited in PubMed Central. It is now going to strengthen these requirements.

It has to be remembered that these initiatives came hot on the heels of the boycott of Elsevier, now signed by some 9,000 researchers, arising out of protests against the Research Works Act  – an attempt to reverse public and donor funder mandates for open access deposit of publications arising out of this research.

Why should this be relevant to us, at the other end of the world and on the margins of the global scholarly publishing system?  At the beginning of this century, African universities and governments needed to rebuild their research systems after the depredations of World Bank and IMF structural adjustment programmes.  The focus in this recovery period tended to be on the need to rebuild prestige and so the policy focus and  reward systems for researchers gave preference to publication in the big international commercial journals, with their high-impact ratings. This has proved a futile exercise. The volume of African articles in the international indexes remains very low and a price is paid for this participation in the distortion of local research priorities, often sacrificed in order to get into Northern-focused journals.

What we have found in our Scholarly Communications in Africa Programme is that the universities we are working with are in fact particularly interested in the potential for the development of scholarly publications that can contribute to their strategies for research contribution to national and local development imperatives. That means working not only with journal articles but also with a range of other research papers as well as ‘translations’, for policy or community impact.  The major international policy announcements of the last week offer a powerful affirmation not only of open access, for reasons of human rights and greater social justice, but also for a broader vision of what a research reward system should focus on. In this regard, we are likely to be involved in a policy dialogue in which developing country research organisations can engage in dialogue about the focus of global open access policy initiatives, contributing to the debate rather than just playing follow-on.

If the Green Paper is implemented as its stands, the universities are facing a considerable upward trend in the number of postgraduate degrees to support sector growth; greater research differentiation between institutions; enhanced attention to teaching and learning effectiveness; effective use of ICT for increased efficiencies in distance and face to face learning; expansion in the number of academics to meet increased teaching and learning and research targets; and the encouragement and nurturing of young academics. Extra funding is proposed to meet these needs. The driving ethos is that of collaboration, cooperation and intra-institutional synergy to ensure that the stronger institutions can contribute to the upgrading of the weaker ones. The Green Paper places itself firmly in the 21^st century as it proposes the adoption of flexible and innovative models of teaching and learning delivery, building on the affordances of information technologies. This is articulated as a way of improving access and increasing economies of scale.

This is an enlightened view of university education that includes, gratifyingly, the endorsement of collaboratively developed open educational resources, the idea of collaborative learning networks, online student support, and the suggestion that government might support the production of open textbooks. The support of UNESCO for OER, as part of  ‘a growing international movement’ (p. 59), is clearly an important motivating force behind this radical move. Indeed, as I write, the SA government is co-hosting a UNESCO Forum on OER Policy in Africa.  The Green Paper mentions UNESCO’s work on open education resources as a motivation for these provisions, but does not respond to the more recent development in UNESCO of an Open Access programme, launched in late 2011 at the UNESCO Open Access Forum.

The UNESCO OA initiative provides some guidelines on what would constitute a more expansive vision of what needs to be done by way of national policy for the creation of a comprehensive approach to research publications and communications. The initiative focuses explicitly on Africa, saying that in spite of improvements in ICT availability, awareness of OA remains low on the continent and in other developing countries. The brochure produced to launch this initiative summarises the advantages of OA thus:

 Through Open Access, researchers and
 students from around the world gain increased
 access to knowledge, publications receive greater
 visibility and readership, and the potential impact
 of research is heightened. Increased access to and
 sharing of knowledge leads to opportunities for equitable economic and social development, intercultural dialogue, and has the potential to spark innovation.

 In other words, OA is perceived in the UNESCO programme as a driver for the development impact from research that the SA government has persistently asked for. It is also the capacity builder that the Green Paper seeks, a space in which research processes and findings can be shared and these findings made available for the creation of learning and training materials and ‘translated’ for use by businesses, social entrepreneurs, and communities. As I set out in an earlier blog on the UNESCO OA Forum ,  UNESCO follows in this initiative behind a number of other organisations and countries that are investigating and adopting new regional and national frameworks for research communication, based on rapidly-changing digital research practices.

The research communications gap in the SA Green Paper

Disappointingly, this is not reflected in the SA Green Paper – a big hole at the centre of its 21^st century vision – with no attention paid to the need for national policy to address access to knowledge through the communication and publication of research. All that we get is the statement that the government wants to ‘increase the number of patents and products developed by our universities and research institutions’ (p. 44).  It looks as if we are back in the 20^th century industrial economy vision of research ‘outputs’ (patents and journal articles) driving national economic development, a very limited view of the potential of research in a digital world.

It is not that our government is not aware of the advantages of OA. It has undertaken investigation of research publication in the last decade. The Department of Science and Technology commissioned evidence-based research from the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAF) on a Strategic Approach to Research Publishing in South Africa  (2006) and as a result supports the ASSAF Scielo South Africa programme for the creation of an open access platform for accredited local journals. The Department of Higher Education and Training has accepted and is implementing an ASSAF report on scholarly books, which includes open access proposals.

These initiatives – as valuable as they are – impact relatively little on the institutions and the ways in which they do or do not support the communication of research. Without the development of more comprehensive national research communication policy, there is room for the persistence of a free-rider syndrome that has the universities and their academics perceive publication as something that someone else does. There is no policy pressure for universities to support the communication and publication efforts of their academics nor to ensure that research investment results in access to the knowledge that has been produced. Where there have been open access initiatives, for the creation of research repositories and, in the case of Stellenbosch University, investment in the creation of an open access journal publishing programme, these have been the result of the hard work of individual champions and forward-looking administrators and so they risk remaining isolated examples in a fragmented system.

What is missing is a comprehensive, nationally-based approach to the communication of research and the infrastructure, skills and support systems  needed to support this. This could be the glue that could hold together a really forward-looking South African research effort, one that could do what it does best – operate at the cutting edge of high-technology research development, as it is doing in the Square Kilometre Array project as well as producing high-level research that impacts directly on improving people’s lives and contributes to national development.

UNESCO has outlined the different drivers that need to be addressed in a national policy of this kind – technology network infrastructure; institutional frameworks to reflect changes in scholarly communication; new business models to reflect societal expectations; collaboration within communities of researchers; and alignment with the national R&D system. These all face challenges in the existing system for institutions and governments that need to be met in comprehensive policy initiatives. I will look at these in my next blog.

* Illustration: Some rights reserved by F. Montino

This is in line with the Open Education Week’s aims:

Open education is about sharing, reducing barriers and increasing access in education. It includes free and open access to platforms, tools and resources in education (such as learning materials, course materials, videos of lectures, assessment tools, research, study groups, textbooks, etc.). Open education seeks to create a world in which the desire to learn is fully met by the opportunity to do so, where everyone, everywhere is able to access affordable, educationally and culturally appropriate opportunities to gain whatever knowledge or training they desire.

At UCT, the key event was an afternoon-long Western Cape-based panel discussion on Tuesday 6 March involving speakers from UCT, the University of the Western Cape and Stellenbosch University.  A gratifying number of people attended, filling the seminar room on what was a mid-term working afternoon. My impression was that ‘open everything’ is a much more mainstream cause that has been the case in the past and is attracting wider attention than before.  Of course, attitudes to open approaches havereceived a boost in South Africa with the Department of Higher Education’s adoption of OER policies in its new Green Paper, as I wrote in a recent blog and the Department of Basic Education’s adoption of OER resources in schools.

Dr Max Price

The UCT Vice-Chancellor, Dr Max Price, opened the panel discussion. This was significant in itself – a Vice-Chancellor lending support to an open education event. Commenting on the mainstreaming of OER policy internationally, Price identified the challenges facing wider open education practices as not only technical, but residing principally in the attitudes of staff. There are a number of fears that have to be dealt with, he argued – IP issues, fear of loss of control, of the work required. Very usefully, Price suggested the need for the creation of incentives, a citation system for OERs and career credit awarded to participating academics.

It was good to hear such a direct message of support from the leader of a university that I have long seen as ambivalent about these issues, but which is now clearly moving steadily towards a more comprehensive institution-wide open agenda.

The panelist’s presentations revealed different approaches in the participating institutions, with Stellenbosch standing out for the strength of the open access programme it is able to implement as a result of top-level logistical and financial support. From UCT, a narrative emerged of longstanding commitment to open dissemination by individual academics and departments, often going back decades. There was also a lively introduction to citizen science initiatives taking place at UCT. There is also a sophisticated understanding of an understanding of what is now an integrated research communication. From UWC also, insight into a long tradition of open source, open education and open access and the increased capacity that this brings.

The two chief challenges appear to be the question of institutional buy-in and top-level championing, and the challenge now being posed to a silo approach to the three university missions of research, teaching and learning and community engagement.

Michelle Willmers

This emerged clearly in the presentation by Laura Czerniewicz from the Open UCT Initiative and Michelle Willmers from the Scholarly Communication in Africa project, also at UCT. They presented a dynamic vision of developments in the ways in which research is now communicated. There is a shift from from a linear model of research publication as the end point and terminus of a research programme to a dynamic networked research environment in which communication takes place at every stage of the research cycle and the distinction between different outputs is diminished. The boundaries are blurring between research outputs as formal publications, research reports and other ‘grey literature’; enhanced publications such as  ‘translations’ for policy purposes or community impact; and teaching and learning resources. This also allows for the development of alternative metrics for valuing research contributions.

Dr Marion Jacobs, Dean of the UCT Faculty of Health Sciences, spoke, from her perspective as the Dean of a world-leading medical faculty, of a strong political and context-driven Afrocentric approach to communications in health studies. This involves recognition of excellence in research publication alongside commitment to meeting the needs of the SA health system in which access to health services is of primary importance. She provided examples of a number of online resources that contribute to public health care, ensured effective communications between health workers and patients in a multilingual country, and ensured the production of students fit for purpose in the South African context.

 Ed Rybicki , an A-rated virologist at UCT, confirmed an unacknowledged tradition – that there are a number of academics at UCT and other SA universities with a long record of putting research and teaching resources online for free access. Ed said that Africa produces just 0.7%v of global research, 66% of that from South Africa. We need to share it, he insisted. Ed says everything that he produces is and has long been open. He described a productive relationship with an Australian illustrator combining free and commercial provision of high quality scientific illustrations and the value of new developments like Apple’s iTextbook formatting tools.  The advantages that have accrued have been wide global takeup of open resources and the immediacy of web exposure of new developments.

Dr Reg Raju

Dr Reggie Raju, the Director of Library IT and Communication at Stellenbosch University  (SUN) described the impact of institutional support at Stellenbosch in creating a shared research space. The goal is to create a research footprint for the university, through an institutional repository, Sun Scholar , now ranked 165 out of 1,200  repositories internationally, and through an investment that has allowed the creation of a suite of online journals published by SUN and hosted on an OJS platform. The results of this programme, instituted in 2011 have been immediate, with rapid and substantial increases in journal readership and impact and growth in international submissions to the journals.

Mark Horner, of Siyavula told a story of a fairly common occurrence – a public interest project that emerges from a university but finds its space for expansion outside the walls of the institution, in Mark’s case with the Shuttleworth Foundation. A programme for open access science textbooks from schools has, in a 9-year trajectory, taken off from the basis of a collaborative postgraduate effort to becoming a mainstream government-supported resource now aiming for independent sustainability. The success story is that 2.5 million print copies of open access science and maths textbooks for high schools are being distributed by the Department of Education.

The afternoon ended with vivid overviews of citizen science programmes in biodiversity, presented by Tali Hoffman and Prof Les Underhill from the Avian Demography Unit in the Zoology Department and the Department of Statistical Science.

What was clear is that open education is alive and well in a number of centres in the Western Cape. However, there is fragmentation and too much dependence on often unacknowledged departmental and individual contributions. The SUN example, demonstrating the power of institution-level investment could usefully be explored in other institutions.  Institutional and government policy development to support open education in its widest sense would go a long way towards delivering the our national goals of growing participation in higher education and the enhancing university contributions to national development.

Paris sunset

In 2011 the last event I attended was the UNESCO Open Access Forum held in Paris in November. I came away with the strong sense that open access was at last in the mainstream, a central component of global thinking, based on access to knowledge as a fundamental human right and on arguments about the effectiveness of open access in contributing to social and economic benefits. At about the same time I was asked to compile an overview of open access in South Africa, bringing me face to face with the variety and the fragmentation of the South African open access scene. What is missing in South Africa was any coherent involvement of government in brokering policies on communication or technology policy for a 21^st century vision of higher education in Africa – where South Africa could be leading the way.

As I discussed in my last blog , a new Green Paper on Post-School Education and Training in South Africa has taken quite a strong stance on policy for open educational resources, drawing on UNESCO’s OER intervention as a validation for this policy strand. But what about open access – access to research findings?  There is very little about research communication in the Green Paper – as is all too often the case with analysis of research capacity development in South Africa, or indeed in the region. And why should South Africa bother?

The UNESCO OA Forum was important not only because the organization is now putting its weight behind OA – and particularly OA policy development – but also for what we learned abut mainstream OA interventions across the world, providing insights into how OA was functioning and what benefits were emerging.

The UNESCO OA strategy was adopted by the General Conference in its 36^th meeting in November 2011, building on UNESCO’s ‘resolve to build knowledge societies through the use of information technologies’. The underpinning vision is that access to information is crucial as a way of reducing the knowledge divide and increasing socio-economic development in a world in which Northern dominance of knowledge production and high prices for technology access and the high prices for peer reviewed research publications act as barriers. The OA strategy plan places a strong emphasis on the creation of an enabling environment, the fostering of collaboration and the advocacy role that UNESCO could play in national policy development (a set of OA policy guidelines will be published shortly).

On the journal front, the message was that OA journals were growing exponentially, from 560 journals in 2003 to over 7,300 in 2011, as Lars Bjornshauge of SPARC reported, but that there is a problem in the preponderance of small, single-journal publishers. For the latter problem, aggregation services are important, something that does have national policy implications, as is the case in South Africa where the Academy of Science is running the the SciELO South Africa initiative with government support. While the overwhelming majority of journals (71% in general and 87% in Latin America) do not charge article processing fees, there are questions around how to deal with the APC costs for those that do, especially for developing country authors. Again, there is a potential policy issue in setting up guidelines and financial streams for dealing with APCs.

There were some powerful players participating in the forum, including the European Commission, the FAO, WHO, donor organisations like the Wellcome Trust, and professional organsiations like IFLA and the International Association of STM Publishers, The EU commitment is to a high level vision of e-infrastrucure  and a package of policies, programmes and activities for the support of OA, spelled out by Carlos Morais Pires, Norbert Lossau and Jean-Francois Dechamp This plays out in two Communities of Practice (CoP), the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) and Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe (OpenAIRE). Preparatory work is being done on a European Open Data Infrastructure (for EU organizational data). The strategic vision behind all this combines the language of innovation, educational empowerment, resource efficiency, economic competitiveness, employment growth and poverty reduction. In other words, mobilizing top level support in the EU for the adoption of an internet society approach to collaboration and openness is not just an idealistic commitment to human rights, but a hard-headed strategy for competitiveness, growth and social stability.  This is based on hard and soft law, is backed up by support services and is worth investing in.

I have had discussions over the years with publishers from the FAO at book fairs over the years and so was very interested to see the comprehensive and powerful programme that is being put into place through the collaborative CIARD programme – for Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research and Development – presented by Stephen Rudgard. The CIARD partners, a wide range of agricultural organisations – will collaborate to promote common platforms, adopt open systems and create a global network of information. The aim is to ensure effective investment in agricultural research, strengthen capacity for the creation of research repositories and also for the ‘creation of networks for formal and informal networks for repackaging outputs’ – in other words for ensuring wider access and appropriate communication levels beyond the research community.

The importance of this kind of ‘translation’ emerged in Robert Kiley’s presentation on the Wellcome Trust’s open access initiative, which requires the research it funds to be published in an open access journal or placed in the PubMed Central repository. This was also endorsed by a statistic provided by Alma Swan – that 40% of the users in PubMed Central are ordinary citizens. Kiley argued that the UK would save money adopting OA publishing, if the APC fees were at the level of £2,000 and that for the Wellcome Trust to support publication of all the research outputs produced from its research that it funded would cost only 1.25% of its research funding. There are also arguments for the effect of the open availability of research as an important stimulus for innovation and economic growth, especially for small businesses, as demonstrated in a Danish study. Citing hard-headed figures, this article explores the costs that are incurred when small businesses don’t have access to research outputs and the financial benefits that accrue through open innovation when they do.

Against this background, it is striking that so little discussion – and for that matter, research – in South Africa pays attention to the importance of effective communication of research and the need for technical infrastructure and skills to support this. Instead, the discussion focuses on journal articles published in ‘leading’ journals (i.e. ISI) and the ‘impact’ status and competitiveness that this is perceived to bring. The Minister of Higher Education and Training knows the limitations of this system, as I have explored in a journal article. It would be good to open a discussion of the advantages of open access for southern Africa in the context of the Green Paper.

Open science

A notable shift in the mainstreaming of OER has been a decision in late 2011by the Department of Basic Education (which is responsible for schools) to adopt open science and maths books for countrywide distribution to all schools. This means the distribution of millions of print books and the availability an online version of the text plus additional resources under open licences.  Mark Horner, Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow and the brain behind Siyavula and Free High School Science Textbooks blogged in late 2011 in a state of justified excitement:

‘Openly-licensed, Siyavula textbooks are being printed and distributed by the Department of Basic Education (DBE) for all learners taking Physical Science and/or Mathematics in Grades 10-12 in the whole country for 2012! I don’t know of any country doing anything like this before.’

The Minister of Basic Education has now formally alluded to this venture in a major speech announcing the school-leaving examination results, as Arthur Attwell has reported.  Arthur hailed this move as a game-changer and a potential turning point in the provision of school textbooks in South Africa. He points out that publishers, who have known about this venture for a while, are very concerned that the provision of these books might undermine the sales of officially selected textbooks, although the Department says that they are intended as supplementary material. It would seem from the Minister’s speech that she sees this move as a model for potential private/public partnerships between the State and a range of non-profit and commercial partners.

The angry reaction of the publishing industry, on the other hand, seems to rest on the perception that the regulated process for the accreditation and distribution of textbooks – to which, to do them justice, they have contributed considerable sweat and tears – has been bypassed.

Although this is not the first time that pupils have been provided with supplementary materials by the national department, my impression has been that in the past these have been workbooks, not necessarily in competition with textbooks. The books being provided through FHSST, on the other hand, are building on a long and careful collaborative textbook development programme at the Shuttleworth Foundation. I do not see this as a matter of state publishing: the FHSST programme was developed independently and was picked up by the Department of Basic Education after its completion.

Horner describes the extensive consultation that took place with the Department in to agree on the necessary revisions and the hard work that followed in delivering to the departmental brief. The books are now freely available on the web, as Everything Science and Everything Maths. The licence (CC-BY-ND) governing the use of the materials is accompanied by a clearly articulated statement of what is allowed:

 You are allowed and encouraged to freely copy this book. You can photocopy, print and distribute it as often as you like. You can download it onto your mobile phone, iPad, PC or flash drive. You can burn it to CD, e-mail it around or upload it to your website. The only restriction is that you have to keep this book, its cover and short-codes unchanged.

One benefit of this open licence is that the online versions of the textbooks are now available beyond the borders of South Africa, and could be of great value to pupils and teachers in other African countries. It will be very interesting to see how widely they are taken up and what further ventures arise from that potential.

The books provide a rich resource, with the conventional PDF/print text supplemented by video materials, for students and teachers, links to support services and to a wide range of open resources, with further enrichment and support material due in March. This should provide a level of interactivity absent from conventional textbooks and potentially a higher level of support in an educational system badly in need of upliftment. The open model should allow for this potential to be leveraged as widely as possible.

Arthur is right about the disruptive potential of this venture. One level on which the disruption plays out is that this venture is being undertaken at national level, allowing for the printing and distribution of millions of books for countrywide distribution.  The normal textbook provisioning and distribution model for books purchased from publishers, although based on a national catalogue, is a painfully fragmented provincial process, full of grief for publishers and booksellers, as the latest issue of the bookselling industry magazine, Bookmark, spells out.

Another disruptive aspect of this venture resides in the availability of digital enrichment materials and additional online resources. It would be interesting to compare the Siyavula digital material with the teacher resource materials provided by the publishers. My guess would be that the Siyavula material is likely to be richer, taking into account the interactivity and social networking potential of the Web. Another telling comparison would be with the resources available in in the higher education system, in open source online learning systems such as Vula at the University of Cape Town (a member of the Sakai consortium), underpinned as they are by high levels of pedagogical and research skills.

The latter comparison becomes even more relevant in the light of another bold move in the SA educational system. No sooner had we got on top of the implication of OER in school education, than the DHET Minister announced the launch of a consultation period for a new Green Paper on Post-school Education and Training. In this document, an argument is made for national support for the development of OER resources as a capacity-building exercise, drawing on the existing digital learning environments already available in many universities and citing mainstream national initiatives by UNESCO, the Commonwealth of Learning, and the initiatives by the governments of Brazil, New Zealand, and the US as role models.

 [T]he DHET will support efforts that invest a larger proportion of total expenditure in the design and development of high quality learning resources, as a strategy for increasing and assuring the quality of provision across the entire post schooling system. These resources should be made freely available as Open Educational Resources (OER) for use with appropriate adaptation. This would be in line with a growing international movement, supported heavily by organizations such as UNESCO and the Commonwealth of Learning (CoL) that advocate the development of OER (p. 59).

Key motivations for OER, the document argues, lie in ‘the potential improvements in quality and reductions in cost’. What is proposed is that DHET will:

• Determine ways to provide support for the production and sharing of learning materials as OER at institutions in the post schooling sector. In the first instance all material developed by the promised South African Institute for Vocational and Continuing Education and Training will be made available as OER.
• Consider the adoption or adaptation, in accordance with national needs, of an appropriate Open Licensing Framework for use by all education stakeholders, within an overarching policy framework on intellectual property rights and copyright in higher education.

This is heady stuff and we are certainly in for a turbulent year. The question going forward will be how to make the potential of open educational resources and open textbooks work alongside the commercial provisioning model, which represents a considerable investment in materials development in South Africa, particularly in the schools system. As the publishers point out, the country needs to preserve the variety and choice that is provided by a successful industry, in the interests of quality education.  But how ready are commercial publishers to break out of their conventional space to take risks with new models?

Then, to complicate things, yesterday provided another wild card:  announcement by Apple of their new textbook venture – the topic of the next blog.

2012 certainly looks like a year of radical change in educational publishing

In a scathing critique of the current journal system on the LSE Impact of Social Science blog, Bjorn Brembs, a neurobiologist from Freie Universitat Berlin, lays into the ineffectual communication system provided by journal publishing in its bloated state, compounded by the distortions that result from the commonly accepted journal hierarchy and its supporting metrics. Given the vast numbers of journals, this is no longer a functional space for dialogue between scholars, he argues. Trying to establish what would be worth reading is skewed further by the use of inaccurate and misleading metrics as a proxy for quality – a blind and misplaced belief in the magic of numeric measures.

The most commonly accepted metric, Thompson Reuter’s Journal Impact Factor, is demonstrated to be lacking in transparency, not reproducible and statistically unsound. Backing up this claim with a number of analytical articles, from PLOS Medicine, the BMJ and the International Mathematical Union, he comes to the conclusion that ‘[T]he dominant metric by which this journal rank is established, Thomson Reuters’ “Impact Factor” (IF) is so embarrassingly flawed, it boggles the mind that any scientist can utter these two words without blushing.’

As Brembs quite rightly argues, there is little correlation between the impact factor of a journal, based on the number of citations in that journal, and the individual articles that might or might not have been cited in that journal. And so the extension of the journal citation count to article metrics and author evaluation constitutes a serious distortion, a blind and misplaced belief in statistics as magic.

Brembs’s critique of the current journal system – and that of the sources that he draws on – also highlights subject and language bias in the citation system and journal rankings, but does not draw attention to the way the system functions to marginalize an overwhelming proportion of the world’s scientists – those in the developing world.

This critique comes hot on the heels of another diatribe, from George Monbiot, in the Guardian on 29 August who lashed out at the paywalls and profiteering of the leading journals and their culture of greed, an article that trended on Twitter, obviously striking a nerve. Brembs endorses and reinforces Monbiot’s rejection of the profit system that drives current journal publishing.

It was therefore good to see a few hundred years of the the original English-speaking journal, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, made available online by the Royal Society. Going back to the first edition, one rapidly encounters what has been lost in the commercialisation of our journals in the last half century. In his Introduction, Henry Oldenburg gives us insight into the spirit of collaboration and experimentation and the openness of communication that the journal aimed for at this time.

Scientific knowledge in this early journal is seen as a conversation, so that ‘those addicted to and conversant in such matters may be invited and encouraged to search, try, and find out new things, impart their knowledge to one another, and contribute what they can to the Grand design of improving Natural knowledge, and perfecting all Philosophical Arts and Sciences. All for the Glory of God, the Honour and Advantage of these Kingdoms, and the Universal Good of Mankind.’

This sounds much closer to what could be an African vision of research as collaboration and participation, contributing to the public good. Modern journals are very closed-up and arcane artefacts compared to this vision. In fact this first journal looks and sounds very much like a blog – with some leading scientists like Boyle, Hook and Huygens contributing – with the serious and trivial side by side, short and longer pieces, explanations of experiments and stories of odd an ingenious things, from how to kill a rattlesnake to an anecdote of old people growing new teeth.

It would be good to see some serious discussion about the tendency for southern African universities and researchers to buy blindly into dysfunctional systems like the ISI Journal Impact Factor rather than determining what our own values are and what research publication systems would best suit our goals. Saleem Badat, Vice-Chancellor of Rhodes University, taking apart the university ranking system in the UNESCO World Social Science Report 2010 finds the same kind of distortions and inadequacies that Brembs complains of.  Badat warns against the ‘perverse and dangerous effects’ than can result from ‘uncritical mimicry of and ‘catching up’ with the so-called world-class university’. Instead, he suggests that the diverse goals of different institutions and countries should be reflected in a horizontal continuum that ‘makes provision for universities to pursue different missions.’

We would do well to listen – a matter of playing catch-up with the future instead of the past.

That on its own would not be too surprising. The broad community I work in is one that is committed to change, to equalising and democratising access to and participation in knowledge production. What feels different now is that our efforts are being accompanied by a landslide of other events – signs of shifts in national and regional policy, consolidated support for open access, acceleration in the development of alternative metrics for evaluating research effectiveness, and increased and sometimes vehement media attention.

In this blog I will try to track the broad landscape of change and will then engage with the different threads in a series of blogs, to spell out what I think the implications are for South Africa, Africa and the developing world. What I fear is that we in Africa are all too often, in our attempts to be ‘world class’, chasing last year’s – or rather last century’s – vision. As Rhodes University Vice-Chancellor, Saleem Badat, wrote in the UNESCO World Social Science Report 2010, there is a danger for developing country universities in ‘uncritical mimicry and ‘catching up’ with the so-called world class university in order to further socio-economic development’. With the current rate of change, this is a clear and present danger and we risk being stuck in last year’s paradigms.

So – a brief overview of what has been happening. (or brief-ish, as a lot is going on):

In scholarly publishing there has been a lively debate on alternative metrics to replace the dominant Web of Science journal impact factor as a measure of research effectiveness. This is particularly important for developing countries, marginalised by this system and by the global university rankings that go with it. The Altmetric discussion has involved the development of a range of technology tools and fostered arguments for more diversified, qualitative and nuanced ways of evaluating academic performance. A core argument is that readers of journal articles should be able to replicate the experiments described in journal articles, requiring the availability of data and information on research process provided online alongside the journal article itself.

This in turn interfaces with changes in scholarly publishing models. In the first instance, there has been a dramatic growth in open access journal publishing. The PLOSOne open access journal model is getting increased prominence and is being emulated by other journals. The features are a broad disciplinary focus rather than a narrow concept of ‘the journal of…’ The peer review model is different, with articles being reviewed for scientific rigour before publication and impact after publication, using ‘citation metrics, usage statistics, blogosphere coverage, social bookmarks, community rating and expert assessment’. PLOSOne encourages the creation of communities, and the generation of a ‘hub’ of information around a journal article.

What emerges is a view of journal publishing that sees the article as part of the research process. This in turn surely means closing the gap between open access and open science.

Commercial scholarly journal publishing has been under the lash in the media, with George Monbiot writing a scathing article in the Guardian claiming that ‘academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist’ and the New York Times charting rising levels of protest in US and UK universities to the high prices of scholarly journals, with cancelled subsciptions and increased support for open access.

The question of peer review has been taken up at government level in the UK, where a parliamentary committee is reviewing this area. It appears to broadly support the PLOSOne model; supports the idea of pre-print servers to allow for collaboration and early feedback; argues for transparency and openness rather than blind review; and expresses serious caution about the use of the journal impact factor as a proxy for individual evaluation.

Intellectual property has also been in the spotlight. A series of regional workshops culminated in the World Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest held at the American University of Washington. The outcome was the Washington Declaration on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest signed by over 700 people in the weeks after its launch. This challenges the industry-dominated IP regime that currently dominates and provides a policy agenda geared to a more balanced acknowledgement of the rights of creators and users.

This approach is echoed in the UK’s Hargreaves Report on IP, commissioned by the UK government in late 2010. The report recommends that IP policy should be based on evidence rather than on industry lobbies; that over-regulation should be resisted; argues for limits on copyright and more generous exceptions; and recommends ways of creating access to orphan works. Parliament has supported the rapid implementation of the report’s recommendation.

The European Union has also taken up the issue of orphan works and has agreed a set of principles for making out of print books and journals available, providing for the digitisation and making available of out-of-print works through a voluntary system run through a democratically-managed collecting society.

In general, there seems to be a move towards openness, rising criticism of big corporation lobbying and protectionism.

I was in a very expensive and sultry Geneva in late June to attend the CERN workshop on innovations in scholarly publishing, among a record attendance of over 260 delegates. Perhaps this level of attendance is a sign that Open Access is maturing and becoming mainstream as it moves on from an emphasis on access alone to the exploration of how openness enhances the effectiveness of science and increases the impact of the contribution that it can make. The programme also reflected a level of maturity in the system, a second-generation approach that took it for granted that we were talking about a well-established system with repositories already set up and functioning and open access journals well established (and growing fast). The focus was less the setting up and management of scholarly repositories or the creation of digital publications than the semantics of an integrated research communication system. In fact a key perception at the conference was William Nixon’s suggestion that the ‘repository’ will disappear into the wider workflow of research communication (an ironic statement from someone who is the Service Development Manager of the University of Glasgow repository).

The overall focus was therefore on how to get extra mileage from repositories, interlinking data, publishing effectively and garnering government support for Open Access and Open Science. Cameron Neylon, Senior Scientist in Bio-molecular Sciences at the ISIS Neutron Scattering Facility at the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), argued in his talk on the Technical, Cultural and Legal Infrastructure to Support Open Scientific  Communication that repositories are a ‘temporary scaffolding’ awaiting the time that we have ‘reasserted the traditional values of research and built the pillars and foundations that will make openness an embedded part of what we do’. Neylon’s core argument was that, while we can resolve the technological issues to build a viable architecture for data analysis, reuse and discovery and have the legal infrastructure needed, what is not there yet is the cultural infrastructure – the commitment, the communities, the assumptions and the practices that could make open science work. The ‘real values’ that he articulated were those of reproducibility, making a difference to the community, getting process, data and narrative to relate to one another and ensuring accuracy and validity.

Related to these perceptions, there was a very useful session on advocacy. Monica Hammes from the University of Pretoria spoke on the Open Access Conversation, a cogent and detailed account of the mind-changing process that is needed and the partnerships that need to be developed to get a university to adopt and mandate open access, arguing that one has to anticipate the emotional responses of the people one is trying to persuade, recognising where their interests lie. Heather Joseph of SPARC in Washington, speaking on advocacy at the national and international level, demonstrated how the wording and the logic of arguments have to be distilled and clarified in order to reach government.  Given the powerful lobbying capacity of the big publishing companies in their push for enclosure, she argued that any advocacy initiatives have to be well argued, supported by persuasive data, be very strategic and need to be built on alliances and communities.

When it came to journals, Mark Patterson, Director of Publishing at the Public Library of Science (PLOS) journals gave a compelling account of the rising success of open access journals and the new models that are emerging in this context. PLoS, he reported, now well established as a journal publisher, ‘is now exploring new ways to enhance scholarly communication through online publications that publish new findings more rapidly, and new products that facilitate the evaluation and organization of content after publication.’ Journals, he argued, are ‘giant sorting mechanisms’ and content can be enhanced and organised after publication. PLOSOne, the revolutionary journal that pioneered this approach, is built on the separation of scientific rigour and impact. The former is reviewed before publication, the latter dealt with only after publication. PLOSOne is growing exponentially – projected to publish 12,000 articles in 2011 – and is being emulated by a number of the big journal publishers. The prediction Patterson makes is that this model of ‘megajournal’ could account for 50% of the literature in 5 years. A variety of new impact factors – beyond the ‘citation count’ – are being explored and the value of the content is being enhanced through the creation of social networking hubs.

Other notable speeches included Barend Mons, a professor of Biosemantics at the Universities of Rotterdam and Leiden and Scientific Director of the Netherlands Bioinformatics Centre (NBIC) who spoke on Nanopublications – an intricate and virtuoso mapping of how the narrative contribution of conventional scholarly publication needs to be embedded in a more complex semantic network of data for effective mining and citation.  There is also a Nature article by Mons and other authors on this topic. Quite how a technical process of this intricacy would fit into our under-resourced universities in Africa, particularly in the smaller southern African countries, is something to reflect upon, but it is good to have a roadmap on where we could be heading in bioinformatics in particular.

On the archival front, Jonathan Deering , software developer from the Centre for Digital Theology at Saint Louis University described a system that has been developed for the annotation of historical manuscripts – something that I suspect would appeal to African institutions working on archival records and lost histories.

The useful lessons for African institutions arising from this conference are to be found in the plotting of a road map of where we should be heading and what benefits could accrue if we get it right. As always, capacity and infrastructure levels will be a challenge for African institutions.

The starting point would need to be the acceptance that research communication lies at the heart of the university enterprise and must be supported. The creation of a repository is a good starting point, then a review of technology supporting the communication of research processes and data.

The road map needs to include technology solutions for linking wider data sets to scholarly publications; the formulation of the arguments needed get support for emerging models of scholarly publication; and expanded metrics for measuring the reach and real impact of research. Most of all, though, the question is how we can link and integrate the different research processes and their outputs in an open and collaborative system, to deliver the development impact our governments keep asking for.

All of the plenary addresses delivered at CERN OAI7 are available online on the workshop website, offering the relevant slide presentation as well as an audio/slideshow file. These are available on the link to the workshop programme. (It is a little obscure – if one clicks on a session title, the speeches – but not the name of the relevant speaker – come up in a pop-up box with hyperlinks. )

One of the pleasures of year-end is scanning the ‘books of the year’ lists in the media, in search of good holiday reading for the southern hemisphere summer. This year there was an additional list – the 10 best books from Amazon Kindle in a variety of categories. The particular attraction of a ‘best of Kindle’ list is the opportunity to do some impulse shopping, with current books that can be delivered immediately at a reasonable price, something that up until now has been a remote option for readers living a long way from the major book centres of the global North. It was thus deeply irritating when, one after the other, these books registered on the Amazon screen as ‘This title is not available in your region – Africa’. This was even more frustrating when, for example, a shortlisted author for a major book prize was an African, yet – you guessed it – ‘This title [i.e. Kindle ] is not available to customers in your location – Africa’.

The frustration is aggravated by the fact that such problems of regional supply are a denial of the promise that digital books could offer in overcoming the serious limitations of print distribution ‘in my location – Africa’ (not of course that I have ever thought of Africa as a ‘location’). One limitation of living in Africa that we cannot access to a wide range of internationally published books, because of problems of market size and transport costs in the traditional print model. In the digital world, even with the restrictions on the Kindle list in countries outside the the US and UK, I have been able to buy a good number of books, for pleasure and work, that I would not have readily found in local bookshops.

Ebooks work off mobile networks and Africa is very good at mobile technology, with high connectivity levels. This is therefore a distribution system that could work effectively, right away, in spite of Africa’s broadband connectivity problems.

This matters, because the small size of local reading markets and the thinly-spread population of countries like South Africa, combined with the period of international business consolidation that has been a feature of the communications industries in the last 30 years has led to a flattening of the book market. In South Africa, imported books in the big bookshops tend to be selected according to the dictates of a homogenised middlebrow mass market global publishing industry. With the exception of a few (exceptional) independent booksellers, it can be hard to get specialist or niche market books, or even not-so-specialist books. Nor would you find that much from Nigeria, or Egypt, or India, or even Australia, although the bookshops do try to stock a range of the mainstream internationally-selling African authors. And yes, at least some of the unavailable books could be ordered from Amazon or through local booksellers, but this involves long shipping delays and very high shipping costs, often as much as the book itself.

Another issue is transport costs. The price of books here tends to be very high; a combination of being very far from the major supply centres in the North, high transport costs; high risk levels for local booksellers; and the addition of VAT.

It is telling, though, that right now there are very few African books – not even those by world-famous authors – available on Kindle including very few from South Africa, the biggest publishing presence on the continent. Even Nobel authors like Coetzee and Gordimer and iconic African authors like Chinua Achebe either have one or two or none of their novels available on Kindle. Instead there are lists of translations or critical works by other (Northern) authors. So the thinking about markets is decidedly North-centric.

When it comes to South African companies like Kalahari.net, which offer online sales of digital downloads and ebooks, the titles available appear to be the same kind of titles that are available in the mainstream bookstores and the digital prices look more expensive than print. So, where I would pay $11 for a Kindle book, I might pay $30 for many of the Kalahari titles (and some of these appear to be PDFs, not even ebooks).

I have just discovered a situation of even greater absurdity. The excellent South African weekly, the Mail and Guardian is now available on Kindle, But…. you guessed it! – ‘This title is not available in your location – Africa’.

In spite of my anger about unavailable Kindle books (which is not Amazon’s fault) I am enthusiastic Kindle user and purchaser of the many books that I can buy through Amazon. Amazon has designed a reader, which, although still fairly primitive technology, is low-cost, practical and effectively geared for the role it is intended for – reading books. I do get a substantially expanded range of books that I would otherwise not be able to access and these are delivered instantaneously, at a lower cost than I would pay for a print edition. And no, I do not like Amazon’s DRM model nor the fact that I am tied to one vendor. What Amazon has done, though, which few if any other vendors have, is to take the trouble to work through the thicket of territorial rights arrangements to facilitate sales in a number of world regions. It would be interesting to know the contribution being made by eager readers in these generally under-served regions to the fact that Kindle sales have now overtaken Amazon’s paperback sales (after all, I repeat, we make up more that 80% of the world’s population.

What UK and US publishers seem to be missing is that if they were to recognise the ability of digital delivery to seamlessly transcend geographical boundaries, there could be very real potential in developing world markets, where, after all, more than 80% of the world population lives. Instead of that, we have a world divided by rights regimes inherited from the print world that are often of baroque complexity. Moreover these rights regimes are, I will argue in a follow-up blog, an inheritance of a colonial mentality and are designed to boost the prices and protect the sales of UK and US publishers.

An interesting exception to this pattern would seem to be Bloomsbury Publishing, which is restructuring itself for global markets, structuring the company according to areas of interest rather than regions, and aiming for global and electronic rights for all the books they commission.

From the other end of the telescope, from the perspective of publishing in Africa, by Africans, if ebooks were supplied in a seamless global market, this could offer opportunities for levelling the global playing field, creating the prospect, for example, of bigger markets for African books across Africa and globally. This is important, as cross-African trade is inhibited by tariff barriers and difficult distribution across often arbitrary boundaries, while African publishers are constrained from reaching global markets by a neocolonial territorial rights regime in which Africa – along with other Commonwealth countries – is regarded as a natural part (subject) of the British market. According to  UNESCO 2002 statistics, high-income countries accounted for 86.7% of all exports of books, while Africa’s share was 0.3%. I would argue that this is not a matter of natural market forces, but of a manipulated market and as long as this is so, there is a very serious access to knowledge problem in the world.

The question, then is why the world is not taking advantage of the democratic (and business) potential of digital book delivery. Why are we still being constrained by out-of-date business models and unequal market practices?

When it comes to government policy and legislation, the trouble is that South Africa, as usual, does not present a coherent or unified picture, but rather embodies a number of contradictions. Perhaps I could borrow a wonderfully vivid description of the situation in the Caribbean in an Intellectual Property Watch article by Abiole Inniss on Fair Usage in the Caribbean, something that could well apply to South Africa:

A panoramic view of the IP situation in the Caribbean would present to the observer a carnival of Olympic size replete with politicians, diplomats, rights advocates, consumer groups, law enforcement, and impotent jurists, all gyrating discordantly to the WIPO band while Caribbean citizens look on, or are pulled or shoved in.

2010 has been dominated, from my perspective, by a negative force, the pending implementation, during 2011, of the IPR Act for Publicly Funded Research of 2008. While I would argue that the default position these days on publicly funded research is that it should, as far as possible, be publicly and freely available, this piece of legislation, a kind of Bayh-Dole Act on steroids, appears to regard the default as IP protection, with commercialisation through patenting as the most desired outcome. This legislation and its implementing Regulations do appear to recognise the need for research contributions that lead to social and non-commercial development. However, the default position of the implementation clauses in the Regulations is that permission has to be obtained from a national agency before any research that is capable of commercialisation and patenting can adopt open innovation or open source approaches.

The legislation places limitations on the disclosure of any research that might ultimately be patentable or capable of being commercialised, requires the application not only of South African law but of any regime anywhere in the world, meaning that potentially introduces the implementation of IP acts that are out of line with South African law. Software patenting could be one of these and open source is, I believe, seriously compromised by this legislation in spite of national policy for open source in government departments. It also places serious restrictions on the approval of international contracts for collaborative research. For these reasons I fear that the unintended consequences of this legislation, which is driven by a well-meaning desire to achieve public benefit from research investment, is in fact going to impose an enormous and expensive bureaucratic burden on the research system, inhibit scholarly publication as a result of the non-disclosure requirements, discourage collaborative research and inhibit foreign and donor investment in South African research.

What this legislation is doing, in short, is providing a 20^th century knowledge economy solution where a 21^st century recognition of the nature of research in a networked world would come to very different conclusions and provide a more comprehensive and complex set of solutions to South Africa’s problems. Very similar legislation has been introduced in India and is being debated by the Indian parliament, which is taking a more critical approach than its South African counterparts did. I believe that similar legislation has been introduced in other countries as well and I do wonder what the driving force is behind this cloning of legislation in developing countries.

However, South Africa is fortunately very good at paradox – perhaps even oxymoron. I was asked in the last few weeks to advise for an international project on the legislative and policy environment for Open Access in South Africa and came to the surprised conclusion that we are probably ahead of the game in terms of legislation and policy for open access at government level. Here are some of the reasons why.

The Department of Science and Technology (DST) – the very same department that is introducing the IPR Act – supports a strategic initiative managed through the Academy of Science of South Africa, implementing ASSAf’s recommendations from its  Report on a Strategic Approach to Research Publishing in South Africa. This programme, which is receiving financial support from the DST, aims to upgrade South African scholarly journals using an open access model. Local journals are being progressively reviewed by teams of academics for inclusion on the SciELO South Africa platform. If they are accepted for inclusion on this platform, the journal gets government subsidy for publication and ASSAf provides support to the uploading, tagging and maintenance of the journal on the platform. There are currently 14 titles listed, with varying numbers of back issues uploaded. This number is scheduled to grow steadily, as the review panels work their way through journals in the different disciplines.

The fact that these journals are hosted on the Latin American regional platform is an added bonus, as this adds to the potential for South-South collaboration and the possibility this initiative becoming SCiELO Africa.

The DST is also supportive of the provision of public access to publicly funded data and the creation of national data repositories, taking steps to create a national research cyberinfrastructure with data curation as a core component of this effort. The Minister opened the 22nd Codata international conference which was held in Stellenbosch in 2010 and a number of South African national initiatives were on the programme.

2011 should see the implementation of another piece of government/ASSAf policy development, in this case for the publication of scholarly books. The Department of Higher Education and Training has approved and mandated the implementation of ASSAf’s Scholarly Book Study recommendations for the recognition of South African scholars’ work published in books and book chapters and for support for scholarly book publication. A key recommendation, which is now targeted for consultation and implementation is for ‘an organised and sustainable national book publishing support system’ that could free scholarly publishing from the current supposition that this is a function that should ‘break even’ or recover its own costs. The report recommends the exploration of the potential of a regional consortium infrastructure which could include platforms for marketing and distribution and for open access publication. A key recommendation is the maximisation of open access in order to widen access and encourage usage and citation. “Pay-for-print’ and ‘see for free’ is perceived as the inevitable future of scholarly publishing, something that is not incompatible with commercial publishing operations.

At government level, 2010 saw the start of a concerted effort to review South Africa’s Copyright Act and to engage with the question of the protection of traditional knowledge (TK), including the drafting of legislation for a national database of traditional knowledge. 2011 is likely to bring activity in these two areas of IP legislation. Exceptions and limitations are likely to constitute a key debate in copyright legislation, while TK poses thorny issues relating to the threat of biopiracy on the one hand, and on the other debates around the appropriateness of IP in this context and the difficulty of determining who the rights holders are in traditional communities.

2011 will almost certainly inflict on South Africa yet again the Chinese curse – ‘May we live in interesting times!’