Category Archives: Scholarly Publishing

ASSAF scholarly publishing team visits SciELO in Brazil

On July 7-11, 2008, a delegation from the Academy of Sciences of South Africa (ASSAf) visited BIREME In Sao Paulo, Brazil. The ASSAF delegation was there to review the potential for the adoption of the SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) model as a platform to manage scientific publication in South Africa. Given that there is a wider African Academies of Science project to boost scholarly publishing across Africa, this could be a spearhead for a future regional open access network. (For background, see my blog of 30 April.)

This was an important visit. SciELO is a model of successful regional collaboration to raise the profile of a developing economy region’s research publication in the face of an inequitable global system. Given that Thomson Scientific is reported to be looking at the question of regional journals right now, it is worth looking at a bit of history. A similar exercise happened in 1982, at which the status of ‘peripheral’ or ‘Third World’ journals was discussed. As Jean-Claude Guèdon describes the result in a recent publication, given the task of reviewing how to deal with a national perspective on contributions to world science, the national perspective was ‘ultimately dismissed, presumably as a provincial exercise of no interest to the rest of the world. Without justification or analysis, a distinction between “local publications” and “mainstream” or “world science” as if it were evidence”.

We live with the results of this perverse interpretation of scientific universalism’ as Guèdon describes it, as we all know.

BIREME has produced a detailed newsletter on this visit in which Wieland Gevers is quoted on South Africa’s position in this regard:

According to Wieland Gevers, among the 225 South African scientific journals, over one hundred have never had an article cited. “South Africa occupies a paradoxical position in the context of scientific publication: it is simultaneously a giant within the African context and a dwarf in the international arena”, defined Gevers. He also added that “we are talking about a country that has nine Nobel Prize winners, and four are related to scientific fields, including
Allan MacLeod Cormack … -the co-inventor of CAT scanning…

We watch the outcome of this initiative with great interest. SciELO could be a powerful partner. Guèdon describes it as probably the most  successful regional/international initiative

– it includes Portugal and Spain as well as Latin American countries
– which has the potential, he argues, ‘to play a formidable role in this battle to remove the divide barriers or, at least, lower them’
He argues for ‘strong international collaboration with well-targeted countries to build a base for the reform of scientific power in a
credible way. These countries are quite easy to identify and have already been mentioned before: they include China and India. Africa must be included because it is suffering the most from the knowledge divide that has been constantly decried, criticised and attacked in this text.’

More background from the BIREME newsletter:

SciELO has had a successful performance in Latin America and the Caribbean, and is an outstanding reference in the process of research, evaluation and adoption of a solution for national scientific communication…The first portal – SciELO Brazil collection
– started operating publicly in 1998. Since then, the SciELO project has developed and is present in eight countries, adding up to over 550 titles of certified journals and more than 180 thousand full-text articles available free online (open access), including original articles, review articles, editorials and other types of communication…

ASSAf showed interest to put into practice a pilot experience with an initial group of five South African publications in order to test the functionalities of the SciELO platform. The BIREME was invited to make a technical visit to South Africa in September 2008 to demonstrate the system to the members of the Academy Advisory Board.

Guédon,
J., 2007. Open Access and the divide between “mainstream” and
“peripheral” science. In
Ferreira, Sueli Mara S.P. and Targino, Maria das Graças, Eds. Como gerir e qualificar revistas
científicas
. Available at:
http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00012156/ [Accessed August 3, 2008].

Stealing Empire – read, listen and join the subversion

This weekend, from 14-17 June the Cape Town Book Fair takes over the Cape Town International Convention Centre, so this blog is about a new book, Stealing Empire, by Adam Haupt, published by the HSRC Press. Last year  close on 50,000 visitors attended, giving the lie to the idea that South Africans don’t read and are not attracted to books. As Dave Chislett said today in his new blog – the Chiz– on The Times newspaper’s blog site, the problem is not that people don’t read  – witness the high circulation of popular newspapers –  but rather that publishers do not publish for them, nor bookshops target readers
beyond the safe urban middle class.

In celebration of the Book Fair, today I am therefore pointing to a book by a UCT colleague and partner in the PALM
project
, Adam Haupt, that does not target the popular readership Dave is talking about, but explores some of the issues of global
media dominance that is part of the proplem. Published by the HSRC Press, this is a scholarly title, but provides an incisive
and lively account of the ways in which global coroporate media interests dominate and appropriate ‘aspects of youth, race, gender, cultural expression and technology for their own enrichment – much to the detriment of all society.’ However the real appeal of the book is not only the study of how this appropriation works, but also of how, in a country like South Africa countercultures like that of the hip-hop activists in the Cape Flats of Cape Town in turn use new media and IP subversion to appropriate their own space. The book explores the MP3 revolution and Napster and digital sampling in hip-hop and explores alternatives to proprietary approaches to the production of culture and knowledge. This is a theorised account of
dominant culture and subversion, drawing largely on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s concept of Empire. This use of theory, said UCT deputy-Vice-Chancellor at the launch a few weeks ago, is in itself an act of appropriation and subversion. We in the developing world, Martin argued, are not supposed to theorise; rather, we are required to provide the raw materials for the theorists of the North.

The extra treat is that you can listen to a podcast on the book that includes discussion of the book and material from what was a very lively launch. The book is published by the HSRC Press, which launched the book at the Book Lounge in Cape
Town, with perfromances from Burni,of the Cape Town feminist hip-hop group, Godessa and Caco the Noble Savage, a hip-hop activist with a wonderfully ironic take on the impact of globalisation that is the subject of the book. Being able to listen to the artists that Adam is talking about provides an added dimenstion to the reading of the book -a must-read accompanied by a must-listen.

Given that this is an HSRC Press book, it is available full text online for free download. Print copies are available for sale in
South Africa and in many other countries through print-on-demand distribution arrangements. So enjoy the Book Fair, but read Adam’s book, too to get a critical perspective of the forces at play

Adam will be speaking in a panel at the Book Fair on Saturday afternoon – “Holding us together or pulling us apart?” The role of the South African Media in the creation and mutation of identities.”

A major boost for Open Access scholarly publishing in South Africa – the Academy of Science springs into action

I came back from a meeting of the Academyof Science (ASSAF) Committee on Scholarly Publishing in South Africa (CSPiSA) last week feeling bouyed up and looking forward to a period of rapid developments in Open Access scholarly publishing in South Africa. We were told that the Department of Science and Technology(DST) has now dedicated a substantial three-year budget to fund the implementation of ASSAF’s recommendations for the development of scholarly publication in South Africa. This is important stuff – a forward-looking government department investing in a major way in the development of scholarly publication, linking this to the country’s strategic science and technology growth objectives and offering support for what is in many ways a visionary Open Access programme that is expected to deliver considerable progress in the next three years.

The ASSAF Report on Scholarly Publishing in SA was an important milestone in the development of a coherent and effective scholarly publishing environment in SA. As reported in earlier blogs, the Report was commissioned by the DST and produced what was probably the most coherent account of the state of scholarly journal publishing in South Africa, concluding with a set of 10 recommendations which included strong support for the development of a ‘gold route’ Open Access approach to journal publishing in South Africa.

The central vision of the report is for quality-controlled and government supported publication of open access journals of a sufficient quality to deliver local impact and international recognition. Quality control is to be through a peer review process carried out across the different discuplines in collaboration with the National Journal Editors’ Forum. Financial support for open access journal publication, it proposed, would be by way of the dedication of a small percentage of the revenue paid to journals through the Departmentof Education (DoE) publication grant system, for the purpose of paying per-article author charges through the institution where the author is based.

Backing this up is a recommendation for the creation of a national technical and promotional platform for hosting and profiling the best South African journals, possibly along the lines of SciELO in Latin America. It is envisaged that the national platform would host selected journals that would profile the best of South African research.

It seems that the DST’s motivation in offering this support is linked to its 10-year plan for human capital development,which proposes a radical growth in the level of postgraduate degrees,publications and innovation levels in higher education. The ASSAf scholarly publication programme is thus seen as a key to the process of raising the bar for the quality and output of research in the country and leveraging upwards the profile of the country in the international research rankings, while at the same time improving the positive impact of research on economic growth and social development.

Open Access has been recommended not only in response to the need for increased accessibility but also for higher levels of international visibility and citation counts to profile South African research in the conventional international rankings. While the focus of this programme is fairly conventional, focusing primarily on peer reviewed scholarly journals that could perform well in the international citation rankings, this is a major step forward simply because it puts publication of South African research in South Africa in the spotlight and, through links with the African Academies of Science, connects this to a broader effort to raise publication levels on the continent. (The creation of an African citation index is one of the recommendations in the ASSAf Report on Scholarly Publishing in South Africa.) And, even more important, this intervention at last recognises that scholarly publishers need support if South Africa research is to be properly disseminated.

We understand that the DST accepts that this model may require long term subsidisation for Open Access journal support and this support is perceived as part of a national service project to build capacity and serve every scholar. To me, as a publisher, this is of central importance. In the OpeningScholarship project at the Universityof Cape Town, for example, we have discovered that the university tracks the authorship of articles (with the purpose of securing the grants that the DoE pays for publication in accredited journals), but that there is no tracking of publication – who is editing or publishing what and where. Publication efforts –editing, peer reviewing and producing scholarly and other publications – are therefore invisible and, not surprisingly I think, under-supported. This is surely detrimental to the university, as this is an opportunity lost to profile the considerable contribution that this leading research university makes to scholarship and development initiatives in the region.

CSPiSA’s delivery of the activities that have been prioritised should start very soon now: the rolling peer review of journals across different subject area will be carried out in collaboration with the Journal Editors’ Forum(see myblog on the inaugural meeting of the Forum last year). The idea is that this will not only be a quality evaluation process but will be designed to provide the potential for the development of the knowledge and skills that could lead to quality improvement. Agreement on the composition of the review panels is being sought and the first subject areas tobe reviewed should start rolling out soon.

A further intervention being undertaken over the next six months, this time with DoE support, is the production of a Report on a Strategic Approach to Scholarly Book Publishing by a selected panel of experts,following a fact-finding investigation by CREST at the University of Stellenbosch. Provisional findings should be available for presentation at the National Scholarly Journal Editors’ Forum in July and it is hoped that the final report should be ready for release in November. Another important milestone, this, as book publication is seriously under-supported and under-valued in South African policy, in spite of the remarkable success of the open access social science research council publisher, the HSRC Press.

Let’s see where we are this time next year. Much further down the road, I suspect.

Our new project – OpeningScholarship – launches at UCT

We have just posted the first blog for our new project. Funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation it will run for the next year in the Centre for Educational Technology at the University of Cape Town. The OpeningScholarship
project, with myself as the Strategic Project Director and Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams as Research Manager, will explore the transformative potential of information and communication technologies in the context of the University of Cape Town, selected for this project as one of South Africa’s leading research universities.

Through a series of case studies at UCT, the project will explore the ways in which new and interactive information and communication technologies are impacting on communication patterns between researchers, lecturers and students and between the university and the community. The project aims to identify ways in which
these new technologies can expand research and learning in the institution beyond the narrow walls of the curriculum to engage the university community with important cross-cutting issues and the convergence of traditional disciplines.

Some of the research questions that we will be asking are:

  • How can an institution such as UCT best build collaboration for scholarly communications across the institution?
  • What could an ICT system such as that at UCT offer in terms of new and opened up communications in teaching, learning and research?
  • How can the ICT systems that are in place help deliver much greater intellectual capacity, allowing the university (and by extension, the country) to rely on its own intellectual capital rather than on imported content?
  • What lessons can be learned from those departments making effective use of ICTs and new approaches to research dissemination?
  • How can existing projects – both departmental initiatives and donor-funded projects – be coordinated to achieve an effective and collaborative institution-wide scholarly communication system?
  • What policies and practices would need to be encouraged if the university is to achieve the maximum impact for its scholarly communications for research, teaching and learning, and outreach?

The intervention will aim to explore the potential of the full range of formal and informal communication strategies available to UCT in the 21st century, from formal scholarly publications to repositories, blogs, wikis, mobile technology, podcasts and video streaming.

We look forward to lively discussion in this blog, in wikis, meetings, workshops and seminars, about the changing dynamics being brought about at UCT through the use of ICTs for communications between researchers, between lecturers and students, and between the university and the communities it serves. It is going to be a lively year!

ASSAf Journal Editors Forum holds its inugural meeting

The Academy of Science of South Africa’s (ASSAf”s) first Journal Editor’s Forum held its inaugural meeting in late July. This was an important event marking what many hope might be the beginning of a new era of expansion and greater impact for scholarly publishing from South Africa. This event marks the first step in implementing the recommendations of ASSA’fs five-year research study of the state of scholarly publication in South Africa. The wide range of recommendations focuses primarily on the strengthening of both the quality and the volume of scholarly publishing, particularly of journals, using an Open Access model. The Journal Editors’ Forum is a consultative body, participating as a community of practice to help build consensus around the road ahead for scholarly publishing.

The meeting was remarkably well attended, with upwards of 100 journal editors and other interested bodies participating. Discussion was wide-ranging and lively and there appeared to be general degree of support for the proposals, including the Open
Access proposals, with the biggest stumbling blocks appearing to be a perceived need to retain print publications, with the sustainability issues that that raised; and the question of society publishers.

Opening address

In his opening address, Dr Bethuel Sehlapelo, Human and Knowledge Resources at the Department of Science and Technology, said that knowledge systems and knowledge production were central to the DST’s new 10-year plan
for a National System of Innovation. The growth targets that have been set in this plan are ambitious: the current number of PhDs annually is 567 a year and this is expected to rise to 3,000 by 2017. The percentage of accredited journal articles published out of South Africa is currently 0.5% of world output and this is targeted to rise to 2.5%. From this perspective, it was evident that the ASSAf proposals for the development of scientific publishing are central to the DST’s main enterprise in growing South Africa’s output and ranking in the global scholarly system, he said.

Dr Wieland Gevers outlined the mission of the Academy of Science of South Africa . The Academy, in line with
its international colleagues, he said, is a consultative body aimed to offer the best expertise, independently of government, on
science-based policy issues. The first project it has undertaken has been its research and policy proposals on scholarly publishing and knowledge production. The Report on Scholarly Publishing in South Africa arising out of this research took note of the potential of new technologies and of Open Access publishing. The recommendations made in the Report focus on the need to support and grow an indigenous South African scholarly publishing industry with international stature, using an Open Access
publishing model. This presupposes the provision of quality assurance as a necessary underpinning, particularly if this initiative is to attract government support. The proposal is for the voluntary adoption of a code of African journal editors and the peer review of sets of journals in order to make recommendations about issues such as accreditation, funding, and copyright.

This quality assurance role would need to be managed with a light touch, he said, a way suitable for a developing country. In this
process, great importance would be placed on developing the next generation of South African scholars. There would need to be support for writers to learn to write well and appropriately in the various disciplines. There would be collaboration with the Higher Education Quality Council in order to feed into the way in which quality standards were to be developed.

As far as a publishing model was concerned, Dr Gevers said that there was an opportunity for the country, using the modality of Open Access gold route publishing, to grow the output and reach of its research publishing, with sustainability coming from government subsidy supplemented by author and institutional charges, as well as other streams of finance. He said that in South Africa, if we are to deliver a high profile publication programme, we cannot avoid Open Access as the major option of the future. When one looks at the traditional, print and subscription model of journal publishing, with its small print runs and slow turnaround times, it is clear that there is no option, he argued, as OA would greatly enhance the impact, reach and speed of the dissemination of South African scholarship.

New technology tools, such as an open source journal management platform, could be made available as a shared resource managed by ASSAf on behalf of participating journal editors.

Government departments were working with the Academy, exploring the extent to which this revolution can be achieved. What was being aimed for was a virtual national information system. In doing this, the Academy would become part of the programme that the Department of Science and Technology was building to increase the human capital of
the country.

There was lively discussion among the journal editors attending around a number of issues.

Thomson Scientific Indexes

From the outset, some editors queried the validity of the focus of government policy on the Thomson Scientific indexes, pointing out that that these were of limited relevance to a developing country’s interests. This linked into further questions about the place of South African scholarly publishing in the context of an Africa-wide approach and the appropriate quality standards that should be applied in such a context. It was agreed that an effort would need to be made to explore the potential of a South African index or an Africa-wide index for quality scholarly publishing and there would have to be discussions with the Departments of Education and Science and Technology to coordinate the ways in which these issues could be tackled.

Green Route repositories

Questions were also asked about the policy for Green Route research repositories, in line with recommendations being made in the rest of the world. Wieland Gevers pointed out that the recommendations of the ASSAf report included support for a national
system of harvesting of institutional repositories. This would be particularly important in providing access to pre-and post-prints of articles published in expensive toll-access international journals.

Department of Education Policy

The Department of Education’s policy for scholarly publishing was heavily criticised, both for generating an over-emphasis on
publication in overseas journals even when very high-quality and globally recognised local alternatives were available; and for
under-valuing publication in books, chapters in books and conference proceedings, something that was particularly damaging to the humanities and social sciences. It was agreed that these issues needed to be raised with the DoE and Wieland Gevers reported that the department would be funding ASSAf during the course of 2008 to investigate the question of quality standards for the recognition of non-journal publications.

Sustainability issues

Questions were asked about the question of sustainability for Open Access journals, given the precarious state of most South African journals. Gevers pointed out that the ASSAf proposals included recommendations for the top-slicing of a small percentage of the DoE subsidies at institutional level. This would provide a per-article subsidy that would make a substantial contribution to viability. However, this was not a finished debate and these were proposals for discussions with the community of journal editors and with government. Dr Sehlapelo said that government was concerned about sustainability and would like to forge a partnership between the academy, industry and government to find a model that does not give the role of sustaining publication to one party only – government.

Contradictory policies in the DST

Monica Seeber, representing the Association for Academic and Non-Fiction Writers, pointed to clash in DST policy, given that the provisions for the Draft Bill on Intellectual Property Rights in Publicly Funded Research appeared to contradict the Open Access policies for publication that were being debated here. Many delegates expressed reservations during the course of the day about the very wide-ranging scope of the provisions of the Draft IPR Bill and its potential to derail scholarly publishing. In the afternoon workshop sessions it was agreed that the Draft Bill would be very damaging to scholarly publishing and that ASSAf should take this up with the DST.

Quality standards and capacity limitations

Queries were raised as to how the proposed expansion of scholarly publishing could be achieved, given the capacity shortfall in many academic disciplines and particularly problems experienced by young academics, often working in a second or third language, in acquiring the communication skills needed for participation in scholarly discourse. Wieland Gevers responded that there are plans built into the recommendations for ASSAf to help build capacity in scholarly writing and editing skills, working with existing courses and mentorship programmes in the universities. ASSAf would provide supplementary support and hoped to be a platform for skilled people who could help contribute, by way of mentorship and skills transfer, to increase capacity and raise quality standards.

The involvement of the Department of Arts and Culture

One delegate asked abut the possible involvement of the Department of Arts and Culture in the ASSAf initiative, arguing that,
particularly when it came to scholarship in the preforming arts, that there was a role for them to play. the answer was that ASSAf saw its role as building interaction wilt all departments involved in scholarly publishing.

Session 2: Publishing Models Paul Peters, Hindawi

In the second session of the day, which focused on publishing models for Open Access publishing, presentations were made by Paul Peters of Hindawi Publishing Corporation in Egypt and Pierre de Villiers of the South African Family Practice journal.

Paul Peters gave an impassioned account of the success story of Hindawi, an African-based publisher which has developed a
financially sustainable and successful Open Access journal publishing business, now the third-largest commercial Open Access publisher in the world. It was a powerful presentation which held the undivided attention of his audience of journal editors for nearly an hour, as he spelled out the different ingredients of Hindawi’s recipe for success. His main message was that African scholarly publishers cannot afford not to go Open Access: all the evidence shows that this is the one way of expanding access to African journals, increasing visibility, attracting a wide range of high quality authors from across the world, and growing the impact of the journals.

Hindawi now publishes 80 journals (in 2004 they had 15) , and is growing this by 1-2 new titles a month. In February 2007 the last of Hindawi’s journals went entirely Open Access. They now get 500 submissions a month. growing at 50% a year.

Hindawi uses an electronic review system to ensure that the process is handled efficiently and rapidly. Paul Peters recommended
that journal editors use an open source system such as Open Journal Systems rather than opting for the inflexibility of commercial systems or the expense of in-house systems.

Traditional subscription systems limit accessibility, Peters said, and are an artefact of the paper world. For smaller journals , he
said, Open Access is not an option, but is essential, as it is simply not possible for smaller developing country journals to get their publications out into the world in the print subscription model. The choice is an Open Access model or a failing subscription model.

Publication charges only work well in fell-funded research areas, he said, and this is very discipline-specific. Advertising is a
possibility, but there are ethical issues in some disciplines. External support by way of direct subsidy is another sustainability
model, but the best option is a mixture of sources of finance.

For Hindawi, the cost of providing discoverability is spread by using a centralised platform. This makes life easier for authors and editors and allows for more oversight of the journal.

Pierre de Villiers, SA Family Practice Journal

The South African Family Practice journal, Pierre de Villers said, uses advertising as its main source of revenue and was very successful as a print journal in terms of its print run and the availability of resources. However, it was still a local journal and the editors wanted to achieve an international status for it. They therefore tried, with limited success, to get into the international indexes. They listed on African Journals Online. Then, when Google Scholar came along, the editors recognised the potential of a system that indexes the full text of scholarly literature.

The journal opted to use the Open Journal System to make the journal more viable. The result was an exponential growth in
submissions and visits to the journal site. They now get manuscripts from across Africa. International reviewers can register online and indicate their interest in joining peer review panels and manuscripts from related disciplines. Review time has been reduced by 50%. The journal has seen an increase of 33% in its published research. It is currently only partially OA – the full text of review articles is available online but only abstracts of the research papers. The journal generates revenue from online advertising.

The Family Practice Journal has established a support service for users of Open Journal Systems in South Africa.

Summing up – Wieland Gevers

Summing up after an afternoon workshop sessio, Wieland Gevers said that the ASSAf initiative for scholarly publishing has the support of important people in government, Gevers said, and there is now a groundswell of interest in scholarly publishing. The research that was undertake by ASSAf is now beginning to provide the basis for something very important. Money has been made available by government to sustain the Editors’ Forum for an initial period. In the first
instance, journals that are recognised in the government classification system can apply to join the Forum and then after
that, other journals can apply. The Academy will keep in touch with members of the Forum by email and will bring to the attention of journal editors the progress that is being made and issues that are current – for example, if in the future, draft legislation such as the recent Draft Bill were published for comment, ASSAf could inform the Editors’ Forum, and could then speak to the Portfolio Committee on behalf of the Forum.

ASSAf could also use its mandate from the Forum to continue negotiations with the Department of Education about the accreditation of local journals and recognition for other publications. it is likely that the government will make things possible now that it might not have done if it did not think that the Academy was available to look after quality mechanisms. it could also, as proposed, set up a centralised journal management platform if journal editors so required.

In closing the meeting, it was agreed that a motion for support for the ASSAf proposals be circulated to all journals listed on the
ASSAf database for input and feedback in order to gauge the levels of support from journal editors for the proposals.