Category Archives: African Scholarship

GraySouth – a new version of my blog. Publishing development research in Africa

IMG_0131My blog has been offline for a while in the wake of problems with its domain name registration. Resolution of the problem involved changing the domain name, so the blog now starts a new phase of its life as GraySouth a name that  echoes my Twitter handle.

The last blog I posted on my Gray-Area blog site was on the neo-colonial underpinnings involved in the emergence of the current scholarly journal system in the wake of World War II, a story of the entrenchment of British nationalism and language hegemony delivered through the growth of commercial scholarly journal publishing. This ultimately led to massive expansion and consolidation of the journal business, leading to the domination of the market by five hugely profitable mega-corporations, able to hold higher education to ransom with ever-increasing subscriptions.

Underpinning the growth of commercial journals has also been, of course, an increasing adherence to a neoliberal commercial view of how the world works and what values should provide the foundations of a publishing system that supports and is supported by, big money. The talk in this context, when it comes to evaluating the success of the university system, is of ‘outputs’, which do not mean the variety of real outputs that universities produce in the process of teaching, research, social, developmental and creative contributions to society, but rather are a code for journal articles and patents that are perceived as contributing to global commerce. What is striking in the discussion of global rankings and journal prestige is how seldom this shorthand is recognised for what it is.

I was due to follow up with a blog on the rise of bibliometrics and their subsequent adoption as a somewhat imperfect way of judging the performance – and influencing the careers – of the authors of journal articles. Eugene Garfield, the creator of the system of metrics, developed a way of  evaluating the status of  the leading journals according to the number of times the articles in each issue of the journal had been cited annually two years after the publication of a particular volume. This was a useful way for librarians to sift the rapidly escalating numbers of journals in order to choose their subscription choices. What was more far-fetched – and not entirely approved of by Garfield – was a very flawed way of making these metrics reflect the prestige of individual authors.

One outcome of the progressive entrenchment of these metrics has been the creation of a captive market in which scholars compete to publish in the highest ranking journals, adapting their scholarship to the ‘international’ focus of these journals. Predictably, ‘international’ in this context meant alignment with the neo-colonial ambitions that underpinned the rise of the commercial journal empires – the English language and the interests of the North Atlantic allies that won the second world war. A vicious cycle resulted in which the journals became ever more powerful and bloated and scholars from countries like South Africa ever more ambitious to be published in these prestigious publications. Given that the system has traditionally depended on strict copyright control, this has essentially meant exporting our knowledge, just as we export our mineral wealth. This heritage of the British nationalist ambitions underpinning the postwar rise of the commercial journal system have thus become an obstacle to the current pressure in South Africa for the decolonization of our universities and for the production of research that supports national development goals. And yet, I suspect, it is not recognised as a key tool in the colonisation of our universities and of our knowledge production as well as a distorting factor in the profile of academic staff in the institution.

A vivid illustration of the impact that this thinking can have on the production of research is to be found in the recent ebola epidemic in West Africa that raged from 2014 to 2016. More than 28,000 people contracted the disease and 11,000 people died in this epidemic. A massive international effort was required to bring the epidemic under control and to limit the death toll even this much. Although the disease had been known since 1976, little research appears to have been done on vaccines or cures until the 2014-16 outbreak, which incidentally also affected a handful of Western medical workers. As the WHO reported in 2016:

There is as yet no proven treatment available for EVD. However, a range of potential treatments including blood products, immune therapies and drug therapies are currently being evaluated. No licensed vaccines are available yet, but 2 potential vaccines are undergoing human safety testing.

It is hard to imagine a situation in which a disease this deadly affected the US or Europe and yet little or no research had been done on it close on 50 years later, leaving the countries concerned vulnerable to a major epidemic. It is not just a matter of African countries having impoverished research systems, lacking the means to tackle expensive and high level biomedial research, but of a lack of will in the university system to take a truly global view of research imperatives. This in undoubtedly made worse by the willingness of developing country governments and their universities to chase ‘global’ prestige and rankings through publication in highly ranked journals that have achieved these rankings by sidelining research from the two-thirds of the world that does not count as global. South Africa is surely the country with the most capacity to take on such a task, but it has also been – at least at the national policy level – also the country most hooked on ‘global’ prestige

Many of the posts that I have written have dealt in one way or another with these issues of the politics of the dominant journal publishing system and the impact of the j0urnal fetish (for the sake of prestige and promotions) on the more complex ambitions of a research system like South Africa. The focus of my blog has been in good part on the publication of what it being marginalised – research that is concerned with the most immediate issues that face the country – of local imperatives, and of  local perspectives on global issues, such as climate change, agricultural development, poverty alleviation. And in particular, what communication modes are being used – and are needed – to communicate such research. Inextricably linked to this agenda is the need to revise the way in which researchers and their research are evaluated and what ‘outputs’ (which are also inputs in this world of national and community imperatives)  are being valued. And essential to this focus is how open copyright licensing – open access to publications on a wider scale than just journals – can increase both access to knowledge from the rest of the world and the participation of our scholars in the global dialogue. At the heart of this kind of publishing is collaboration in the interests of greater effectiveness and real impact.

Finally, and possibly most importantly, the obsession with journals, now bolstered by the growth of digital journals and open access publication, has obstructed the potential for radical new models of scholarly publication and dissemination. We are stuck in an online simulacrum of a 17th century publishing model, updated in the mid-20th century.

Looking forward, I see signs that there is a renewed interest internationally and also in South African research policy in the production of research for Sustainable Development Goals, for research aligned with national and local imperatives, for greater attention paid to communities and their knowledge. Whereas European countries might measure this in terms of the journal articles published on such issues, South Africa has long had a more complex, yet under-recognised, approach to publishing development research outputs – not just ‘applied research’ and ‘grey literature’ but a more sophisticated mix of high level and rigorous research and carefully targeted publication outputs. This needs more extensive exploration and support and better alignment with the core research values of the institutions.

Photo: Eve Gray CC-BY

 

An Elsevier African Megajournal Proposal Re-colonizing the university in Africa?

17496189016_fe7a3ed029_z-1In 2015, South African universities saw widespread student protests against a neocolonial heritage at universities that stood accused of a lack of post-apartheid transformation in institutional ethos, curriculum, and racial demographics. Operating under a number of hashtags, such as #RhodesMustFall, #DecoloniseTheUniversity and #FeesMustFall, the one issue that no-one seemed to speak about was the influence of the scholarly publishing system, which has a strong influence on faculty reward and promotion  systems., entrenching many of the trends that students were protesting against. A series of blogs will explore the political economy of scholarly publishing and the role of Open Access in South Africa at a crucial time in its university history.

Elsevier has recently rattled the rather glum view of the prospects of African journal publishing with what looks like a major intervention – a proposal to explore the potential for the development of an African megajournal. Could this mean that Africa – which until recently has hardly been on the radar of the big international journal publishers – has something to offer this large and hard-nosed multinational academic journal publisher? Could this venture under the Elsevier banner provide the imapact and prestige that the continent’s research has been so sadly lacking? Or could it be simply that it could provide a blank slate for Elsevier, experimenting in the face of market uncertainty?  Or, at its crudest, just a neo-colonial land-grab in the face of challenges in the markets that Elsevier dominates?

It is perhaps a sad commentary on perceptions of the African continent that when a big corporation targets Africa as a new market, as Elsevier appears to be doing with this proposal, one of the first questions that can be asked is, ‘Does this mean that Elsevier’s business model is under threat?’  Given that the European Union, for example, is aiming for mandating full Open access to research by 2020 – with no embargoes, and affordably – and given also that governments like the Dutch government have been engaged at national level in hard negotiations with Elsevier to reduce subscription costs at a national level, it is quite possible that the commercial publishers are indeed worrying about the future of their current very high profit business model.

This is not without it ironies, however, as these developments have also come at a time when some major OA advocates are arguing that the current vision of OA is failing, a victim of its own tendency to over-zealousness and and lack of strategy and its capture by multinational journal publishers in the wake of the adoption of  ‘gold’ open access journals funded by Article Processing Charges (APCs). The field is thus very uncertain indeed.

From the publishers’ side, it is very telling that Elsevier has recently acquired SSRN, the social sciences open access collaborative platform, after buying Mendeley some years ago. The most probable motivation behind these purchases would seem to be a strategic vision of the power to leverage open data in a networked research environment in which data analysis has become a powerful strategic research tool. Controlling large data sources is likely to become a very powerful base for a commercial company that wants to provide metrics as a core competence, as Elsevier already does through Science Direct.

The main problems for African research publishing up until now have been interconnected: a general lack of interest on the part of African governments in funding or supporting scholarly publishing activities; and exclusion from the mainstream of prestigious international scholarly journal publishing, with African journals and their content being regarded as of ‘local’ interest only, with very few of them qualifying for the citation indexes. So for research institutions to be courted by Elsevier might prove very seductive, offering as it does the potential for the ‘international’ cachet of association with a big name in global scholarly publishing.

What has happened is that group of research institutions – the African Academy of Sciences, the South African Medical Research Council, the African Centre for Technology Studies, an inter-governmental think tank,  and IBM Research Africa are considering the creation of an African megajournal with Elsevier. They are being courted through Elsevier’s undoubted ability to offer a high level of technological support, author and publishing training, and the potential for international profiling of African research. Given the profile of the research organisations involved, there are serious questions to be asked about what it will mean for African governments to have this scale of strategic research publication – scientific, medical, technological and research networking – placed in the hands of a profit oriented publisher as hard-nosed as Elsevier.

Elsevier publishes a number of African journals and participates in the WHO HINARI initative for the provision of free or low-cost medical journals to developing countries. It also h as its own corporate responsibility programme, offering training, conferences and workshops. It has, for example, for over a decade offered a twinning programme between African medical journals and leading biomedical journals in the US and UK, enhancing editorial and publishing skills to grow their presence and reach, as well as running mentoring programmes and skills development initiatives for African journals and their authors.

A review of of other large journal publishers shows a similar signs of an expansion of interest in research from Africa and the developing world.  Taylor and Francis over the last few years has developed a long list of African journals, with an editorial office in Johannesburg, a mission to collaborate with with learned societies and institutions and partnerships for co-publication with local publishers. This has been a particular strategic focus, with active recruitment of local titles. Biomed Central has a prominent Malaria Journal, has held African capacity building workshops and conferences and runs the Open Access Africa Twitter feed. Wiley has just announced a partnership with Egypt-based Hindawi Publishing, initially for the publication of nine journals, which will be managed by Hindawi and published on their website. In this way, Wiley says that it aims to benefit from experience in OA publishing and Hindawi’s experience in what is described as a rapidly expanding market.

Should this activity perhaps be welcomed? On the whole, the continent has been sadly lacking in the exposure for its research,  skills development, technology capacity and infrastructure support that Elsevier is offering. And undoubtedly, there will be many scholars and institutions who would be delighted at the profiling and potential for increased impact and reach that would be offered by one of the biggest journal publishers in the world.

According to a study of journal publishing in Africa, commissioned by African Journals Online (AJOL, covering 330 respondents, the majority of African journals are – often struggling –   ‘scholar journals’ run on a voluntary basis by individuals or small groups of scholars, with only 19% of journals surveyed published by commercial publishers. Support from universities and national governments has been largely lacking.  AJOL, an initiative supported by INASP, hosts 517 journals on its online platform, of which 208 are open access, offering 65,917 OA articles for download.

The South African government has been an exception to the general pattern of national -level indifference to scholarly publishing, with the Department of Science and Technology supporting the SciELO South Africa journal publishing platform through the Academy of Science of South Africa. What this offers is the provision of financial support for journals and their hosting on SciELO SA in partnership with SciELO Brazil. There is no doubt that if this were to be expanded rapidly and extended to other African national academies of science, through NASAC, this could provide a path to a powerful regional presence, on the Latin American model.  This was discussed at a high level forum held in 2015, under the auspices of UNESCO and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Is Elsevier’s proposed megajournal likely to be of overall benefit to the continent?  According to the first reports, this is likely to be an OA journal using APCs, but perhaps with a 5-year development period in which no APCs would be asked for. Elsevier claims to be planning long-term for a low-cost APC for this venture, probably with additional donor support. There could therefore be a window for the growth of the journal and whether or not the venture lands up ultimately facing Elsevier’s commercial OA model with very high APCs would remain an open question for quite a while. And would the journals find themselves part of a truly international community of scholarship, as a result of this venture, or consigned to a special-case ‘developing world’ status?

Elsevier’s aims are expressly developmental, aiming at wider exposure for African research across the African continent, applying affordable APCs without resorting to the exceptionalism of donor-funded support for distribution of journals in the developing world. Considerable support is proposed for authoring and technology infrastructure, training in the different aspects of journal publishing. The company has an extensive corporate responsibility programme with a wide variety of initiatives aiming to support and expand the discoverability and accessibility of African research. It is aiming to partner with 39 journals in Egypt, five in Nigeria three in South Africa as well as the megajournal proposal. The institutions responsible for these journals, Ylann Schemm from the Elsevier Foundation assures us, will retain full ownership of the journals, but the content will be hosted as OA on Science Direct. The proposed megajournal, in this context, Schemm describes as a joint effort with funding agencies, governments and NGOs, reliant on Elsevier’s publishing capabilities to create ‘a common platform for African research’.

But there is a negative side. There has been a considerable growth in the number of funding agencies demanding open access to the research that they fund, leading to a rise in the number of ‘green’ open access repositories; support for the payment of APCs for OA journals and for hybrid journals. In this context, a spate of complaints about the good faith of large international publishers in operating open access gives cause for concern.

The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), in a statement signed by a long list of international organisations, complains that Elsevier’s OA policy, introduced in 2015, in fact restricts rights for articles placed in repositories, rather than providing fully open access.  Embargoes are imposed, up to 48 months; the licence applied is CC-ND-NC rather than the open CC-BY licence; and the publication licence applies to all articles previously published and to be published in the future.

Thus Elsevier has developed its own version of OA licensing. Very few authors would understand the implications of these provisions, and the limitations they could place in the way of access, but as an Australian editor put it when he was sacked for protesting when his journal, the Medical Journal of Australia, was outsourced to Elsevier:

‘One of the fundamental questions is whether you regard the knowledge that’s generated through research as a common good… In other words, it should be there for everybody to use, paid for by the community through its taxes to research workers, or whether someone can come along and put a fence around these paddocks and say, “Well that’s actually mine.”’

There have also been complaints from the Wellcome Trust, as a major funder of the OA publication of the research it supports. Wellcome complained that more than half the articles it had paid Wiley to make open in hybrid journals were not compliant with the depositing and licensing requirements. Elsevier did not comply in 31% of hybrid journals and 26% of full OA journals. All PLOS articles were compliant. Wellcome said that it had paid for close on 400 articles published in the hybrid model that had not been deposited, as required, in the PubMed Central repository.

Lastly, as the entire editorial team of linguistics journal Lingua, found out when they opted to leave Elsevier, they could not take their journal with them – it now belonged to Elsevier – and they had to found a new journal.

It could be argued that OA status would protect the journal and its content from capture – after all open is open, surely, and the content should be accessible in perpetuity. For all this, there is surely a risk in allowing a commercial company, and one with a very strong commitment to high profit levels and to the exclusionary competitive ethos of the Impact factor, to have control of the the research publication of key African research councils. The research produced by these councils is of national and regional importance and its capture by a commercial company might put at risk the ability to leverage the research for public benefit. There are particularly hard questions to be asked about medical journals, for example.

To complicate things further, South African universities have at been facing upheaval as resistance to the neo-colonial state of the higher education curriculum has taken centre stage in a wave of student protests in the country.  Campuses have been burning to the chant of #RhodesMustFall and #Decolonising the university. How does a progressive takeover of the publication of African scholarship look in this context?

Photo: Desmond Bowles – CC-BY-SA – http://jdbashton.com/rhodes-must-fall-part-2/

By Eve Gray

Open Access and African Research Publishing in the 21st Century

What needs to be done to achieve an enabling policy environment and the necessary technical infrastructure and professional  skills in Southern Africa to foster the effective communication and publication of African scholarship? 5134325669_1a8fc4b51e_m

And what benefits would accrue from more effective communication of the scholarship in the region?  What would the region gain?

These were the core questions explored by a variety of speakers at a Leadership Dialogue attended by southern African Vice-Chancellors and organized by the Southern African Regional Universities Association (SARUA), at which the UCT IP unit was a joint sponsor. This workshop, a prelude to the Going Global 2016 conference being held at the Cape Town international Convention Centre, focused on Open Access and African Research Publication in the 21st Century.

The choice of this focus on Open Access was triggered by an announcement that Elsevier was sponsoring the development of an open access African megajournal, in collaboration with the African Academy of Sciences, the African Centre for Technology Studies, the South African Medical Research Council and IBM Research Africa.

This initiative, under the auspices of the Elsevier Foundation, an independent charity founded by the company, appears to be doing a lot of the things that African governments ought to be, but are in general not doing. Elsevier has sponsored open access workshops with AAS, offers training in writing and publishing skills, and sponsors the use of technological platforms for open access dissemination.  ‘We believe that there could be a much greater return on investment over the next ten years if African institutions, access programs and publishers could address awareness, usage and research capacity in a collaborative and integrated manner’  the Foundation states[1].

The question that arises from this is a crucial one. If, as African governments tend to approach research publication, the general trend continues to be a free rider syndrome in which everyone steps back and says ‘Publishers can do this well, so we do not have to’, what are the potential gains and losses? The gains may be highly professional journals – this time with African content, unlike the historical content profile of commercial journals. However, an ostensibly public benefit initiative such as this, which focuses on the core business out of which Elsevier makes its very substantial profits, is unlikely to stay completely free of charge for very long. Once it begins to be monetized, will African scholars, universities and governments be able to afford to publish in it? They will be able to read it, but payment levels for publishing an article are likely to be so high that only well-endowed authors from overseas universities will be able to afford it. In other words, will it become another neo-colonial enterprise?

The outcome would in these circumstances be that African-based scholars would have access to the journal – the ability to read the articles – but are unlikely to be able to participate in the production of the knowledge in the journal and could lose African control over the publication of a lot of African research.

I will return to a more detailed discussion of the perspectives provided by the different speakers in subsequent blogs, but here are some key points offered on how policy change could be best achieved and what the policy environment could look like.

Government support for regional OA – the Latin American model

The key policy pressure point if Africa is to achieve effective dissemination of its research production is the need for more active government involvement in providing financial support for the communication and publication of scholarship. This could be support for the development of publishing efforts, for journals, books and development-focused research outputs, something that is certainly needed. This is an environment, in which most local journals struggle on, on the back of voluntary labour and inadequate technical infrastructure.  Scholarly books can only be produced in low volumes and have to be targeted at a general readership to survive at all.  And the large volume of research that is produced by the scholars who aim to address African needs and counter African problems is largely lost – never published, or is published by individual research units, to reach limited audiences.

There could also be government support for the use of digital platforms and repositories to ensure the publication of what is produced – the ‘green route’ of the open access movement. The strongest models offered by the speakers at the conference were supported by national and regional governments, through federated repository systems hosting journal articles, theses and dissertations, and other outputs. In South Africa the Academy of Science of South Africa is following this route in alliance with the Brazilian SCIELO initiative, offering government support to journal publishers in getting exposure for their journals.

This draws on the fact that the prime example of the collaborative approach to the dissemination of scholarship in the developing world is in Latin and South America, where research and its dissemination is mainly government funded and built on regional co-operation. There are 3,500 journals on regional platforms, 76% of them OA with no article processing charges. La Referencia provides confederated repositories in 8 countries giving wide regional reach to scholarly publication. There is open access legislation providing OA mandates for the publication of government funded research in Peru, Argentina and Mexico. The benefits of this system are higher visibility and access and increased citations for an entire region. It has also made Brazil the second biggest publisher of open access journals in the world.

Brokering policy change – the European Universities Association  

The other regional level initiative discussed was from the European Union’s Horizon 2020. This is built upon the need to acknowledge the new ways, in a digital world, in which research is conducted, assessed and used by other researchers and society. It aims to develop new and alternative ways for researchers to conduct, publish, and disseminate research in a digital world. The overall initiative is supported at top level in the European Commission, with Director level EC executives responsible for implementing the programme. In other words, the European Commission sees research and the communication of research as a key strategic focus that will help growth and improve lives in the region.

On the ground, the policy being implemented through the European Universities Association is in the first instance underpinned by the development of a number of documents to support HEIs in making the decision to implement OA. An Expert Group on Open Access has been set up.

The main actions include:

  • Information gathering and sharing, mapping the EU OA landscape and establishing a platform for dialogue and the sharing of good practices.
  • Dialogue and mobilization of researchers, using workshops and other fora, engaging them in the development of new academic recognition systems.
  • Engaging with publishers to discuss economically realistic and viable conceptions of the OA future.
  • Mobilising politicians for a fair and balanced and innovative publishing system, using position papers and seminars at national level.
  • Encouraging researchers to deposit their papers in institutional repositories (this works better than mandates in the EU environment).

In other words, the recipe in this context is concerted action in the academic community, with a lot of time taken in mapping implementation needs, reaching consensus and setting up activities.

West Africa: Codesria’s African vision for African Research Dissemination

At a conference held in Dakar in early April, the declaration that emerged from an extended discussion of research publication in Africa stressed the need for consensus building on OA, on collaboration across the region through the creation of dialogues, the creation of infrastructure, including a regional confederated OA platform, and educational programmes building capacity in publication, technology management and use, and in academic writing.

The importance of government support for open scholarly communication, through financial and logistical contributions, was stressed as a necessary contribution to a successful higher education system that could contribute to national and regional priorities.

Delegates agreed that the reward system, currently dominated by the Impact Factor and the push for international ranking, needed to be replaced by a broader-based and locally relevant recognition system. This, in fact was seen as one of the major hindrances to the delivery of an effective, locally and internationally relevant research system.

A working group would need to be created among African research institutions to drive change in the region, working with local champions to broker change from the bottom up and developing the arguments to persuade governments to provide more support for universities and the dissemination of the research being funded by governments and donors.

Recognition and reward systems

The workshop’s focus on the values inherent in the research enterprise highlighted the impact of market-driven approaches to research delivery and the distorting effect that this could have on developing country universities and their research. The negative impact of market driven approaches on research priorities and on reward systems has to be assessed and care taken to align the core identity and mission to society of African universities, argued Sijbolt Noorda, of the Magna Charta Observatory, one of the sponsors of the Leadership Dialogue.

Brokering change – an African perspective

The message that emerged overall was clear: there needs to be a change initiative driven by champions and experts drawn from the research community, focused on actively brokering policy change, producing policy briefs drawing on strategic approached to change management. This needs to be fostered through the creation of communities of practice, drawn from universities and research councils, using social media, policy-focused advocacy, workshops and seminars targeting key policy-makers. This enterprise will need to draw on the African-focused research that has already been carried out, largely donor funded.

Some practices seen as self-evident in the US and Europe, for example, like setting up an institutional repository run by the library and supported by the university’s ICT division, have proved highly problematic in poorly resourced universities, in regions where training in digital librarianship is patchy and ICT infrastructure is under-resourced. As publishing consultant Garry Rosenberg pointed out, the domination of the large commercial journal publishers is built on their ownership of symbolic academic capital, driving reward systems, something that repositories cannot deliver to developing country researchers and their universities.

It is important that the models conceptualized be appropriate to the African context and not blindly drawn from models prevalent in the global North. The practice of charging Article Processing Charges for open access journals paid by the author, for example, is proving problematic even in rich countries and is highly exclusionary in countries where there are not the resources to support researchers to pay APC charges.

Sustainability will be a core issue. African universities are under-funded and academic staff tend to be overworked and burdened with heavy teaching loads. A major threat to sustainability in these circumstances resides in the addiction to the prestige of international journals, a hugely expensive system that drains the resources of universities. In addition, it is inimical to the publication of research that is of critical importance in Africa but does not have impact in the United States. The recent Ebola epidemic is a powerful example of the negative effects of such a system. Weaning the academic community from the promotion systems that tie universities into this publication system have to be part of the advocacy and policy change programme.

Lastly, any policy change intervention will have to address the need to draw on the full range of research outputs that are produced in African research institutes in particular. Usually categorized somewhat dismissively as ‘grey literature’ these less formal publications, often of high quality, address the variety of audiences that need access to research findings, in agriculture, public health, ecology, and educational development, to name but a few.

The different levels of publication, the different audiences that need to be addressed, and the resources needed in different contexts will all have to be identified.

Working with government

Finally, any policy change initiative will need to identify, build relationships with and collaborate with informed and sympathetic players within government departments and parastatals. These champions will be needed to expand the constituency within government circles and help identify networks that policy brokers could tap into.

In order to achieve this in a chronically underfunded and under-resourced system – a persistent hangover from World Bank and IMF policy implementation in the last decades of the 20th century – is going to be a considerable task. What is going to be needed is focused and policy-driven information on the benefits of effective communication of the research that is carried out, not only for publication in prestige journals and university rankings, but especially in research areas that address the major imperatives in the region. The question is how effective research communication can help build countries.

The wild card – piracy

Globally, piracy may well play its role in changing the system as the SciHub site set up in Kazakhstan, with its huge library of journal articles is already suggesting. Used for millions of downloads, most of them, ironically, from the well-resourced countries with the highest level of access to commercial journals, this may well prove to be the Napster of the scholarly publishing world

[1] http://planetearthinstitute.org.uk/partner-spotlight-elsevier/

Open access in Africa – green and gold, the impact factor, ‘mainstream’ and ‘local’ research

I have been following the debate raging in the UK and beyond about whether the Finch Commission and the Research Councils UK  – and then the EC with a slightly different emphasis – were right in opting for support for the ‘gold route’ of open access publishing rather than prioritizing only the ‘green route’ of open access repositories. There seems to have been a general consensus in the commentaries that I have read that this will disadvantage the developing world, which will be faced with the barrier of high article processing fees and become increasingly excluded. The green route, through continuing creation of institutional repositories, would be better for us, we are told.

I don’t agree. The reasons are complex, but at heart this takes us back to the question of whether we are seeking access to or participation in the production of global literature. Which policy path would most effectively give voice to research from Africa, largely silenced in the current system? Access to world literature is also important, but is inadequate on its own, risking perpetuating a neo-colonial dispensation that casts the dominant North as the producer and the developing world as the consumer of knowledge.

I have come to think that the green/gold debate is in fact a distraction from dealing with more insidious issues in our research publishing systems. These include the dominance of journals at the expense of other forms of publication; the almost universal adoption of the ISI and its Impact Factor as the basis for recognition and reward; and, most insidious of all, the marginalization of great swathes of global research through the implementation of this commercialized ranking system.

Another related but under-recognised issue is the extent to which there is an assumption that scholarly publishing is a commercial business, built around profit creation. This has led to a free rider syndrome, allowing senior administrators to remain oblivious to the need to address support for research communication as a policy issue. In this regard, Finch sets a good precedent, in making it clear that getting beyond the issues that block effective research communication requires government investment.

Once the argument moves to discussion of what the impact of these new open access policies would be on the participation of the developing world, then the nature of the debate changes. I would argue that the either/or dichotomy between green and gold is in fact a distraction –  the wrong question, generating the wrong answers. Whether green or gold is not that relevant in the African context unless one understands the mechanisms of exclusion that consigns our research publications to the margins. Even then there is unlikely to be a clean either/or solution. What is important is an understanding of the contextual issues and the power dynamics that are at play.

 History and context – a neo colonial system

African universities outside of South Africa tend to be very young, with most institutions dating from the post-colonial period in the second half of the 20th century. Only a few decades later, the World Bank and the IMF implemented structural adjustment programmes that marginalized higher education in favour of primary schooling. Just as the higher education system was expanding in the global North, universities were starved of funds and thus of the continuing growth that they really needed to function effectively. In the 1980s and 90s, if you appreciated diatribes that could sear your eyeballs, you had only to listen to African intellectuals at conferences berating structural adjustment, the World Bank and the IMF.

In around 2000 came the solemn revisionist discovery that in fact higher education was very important and should be supported. This was not long after South Africa emerged from apartheid, so the 21st century in our region has been a period of reconstruction of battered higher education systems. In these circumstances, there were two conflicting ambitions in the minds of university leaders. One was to be able to [re]join the global academic community, building prestige and recognition in the competitive terrain of publication impact and university rankings. The other was to demonstrate a contribution to national and regional development in countries that faced overwhelming challenges.  Or, as a university administrator put it to us recently, the biggest battle southern African universities face is to combine the achievement of both prestige and relevance.

One has to ask why this is so difficult. The answers are to be found in the ideology and global hierarchies created by the corporations that had come to dominate the journal publishing system. Open access developed in good part in reaction to the dysfunctional nature of this bloated system and its vertiginous subscription rates. In the global North, the debate has largely been about how to get visibility for journal articles locked behind paywalls in these journals and less about hierarchies of knowledge that marginalized a great deal of world research.

 The impact factor

The reason that the two goals of local and international impact are irreconcilable in our region has a lot to do with the universal adoption of the ISI Impact Factor as the dominant metric used as the preferred route globally for achieving research recognition in a managerialist and competitive higher education system. The IF is also, in the developing world, the biggest barrier to the achievement of recognition.

I have enjoyed the targeted and tough attacks on the rigour and credibility of the Impact Factor by Stephen Curry and Bjoern Brembs in recent blogs. As someone who flinches when I hear the term ‘bibliometrics’, I appreciate Brembs’s comparison of the IF with ‘homeopathy, creationism or divining’ and would readily encourage the adoption of Curry’s series of declarations:

  • If you include journal impact factors in the list of publications in your cv, you are statistically illiterate. 
  • If you are judging grant or promotion applications and find yourself scanning the applicant’s publications, checking off the impact factors, you are statistically illiterate

The trouble is that the IF is taken with deadly seriousness in southern African universities and is all too often used as a proxy by international agencies for the evaluation of national research effectiveness. Lesser known is the extent to which the criteria for inclusion in the ISI are skewed to actively exclude the developing world and its interests from this dominant system. As Guèdon describes, by an extraordinary sleight of hand a distinction was made by the ISI in 1982 between ‘local’ and ‘international’ or ‘mainstream’ science. ‘Local’ or national research was relegated to a lower level – or irrelevance – and only ‘Third World contributions to mainstream science’ would be considered for inclusion in the ISI.  In other words, a research article gets into the ISI if it addresses the interests of readers in the English-speaking North.

In this way, the research interests of three quarters of the world are relegated to irrelevance in the dominant global scholarly publishing system and downgraded to the ‘local’, while whatever is included in the Science Citation Index constitutes mainstream science. Effectively, Nelson Mandela becomes ‘local’ and George Bush ‘international’.

We could perhaps learn from Groucho Marx giving the finger when he was refused membership at a country club: ‘I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.’

 Institutional repositories

What this system has inevitably meant is that there are very low rates of publication in the ISI from the countries consigned to the periphery. This is particularly the case in the smaller African countries outside of South Africa, which dominates African production in the ISI. Does it make sense to maintain an OA institutional repository to profile ISI journal articles when many institutions are producing between 25 and 100 articles a year? And in institutions that are battling with issues of capacity and infrastructure in the wake of the policy turbulence that I have described, should these repositories be institutional or subject-based? All in all, the role of repositories – regional, institutional, subject-based, archival – may well be different to the common assumptions about journal article deposit and mandates.

 Beyond journals – local relevance

While the road to prestige and rankings is delivered largely through the commercial journal system, the way to social and development impact is surely through open access, with the ‘grey literature’ that Finch recognized at its heart. In our context, in Africa, access to the non-journal literature is not, as Stevan Harnad averredmerely providing access to research data and grey literature’ that the Finch Commission recommended for inclusion in repositories (my emphasis). Rather, in the developing world, access to this kind of research output is a very important part of ensuring the relevance of research to local and regional needs – or indeed ensuring the wider impact of research outputs in ways that have recently been recognised in the World Bank’s OA policy.

What this does raise is the question of peer review. Universities are anxious to ensure the quality of the research that gets placed online and are exploring alternative quality evaluation approaches to deliver this goal.

 The question is, therefore, what open access policy should look like in the developing world and in southern Africa in particular. This is likely to  include open access publication; the recognition of a wider range of  research outputs; repository and communication strategies that recognize this and which take account of the realities of available capacity and infrastructure. And – a challenging issue – how to change reward and recognition systems to bring them into line with the real strategies of governments and institutions?

Academic spring – open access policies take the world by storm

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.