Category Archives: Open Access

‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.’ Thomson Reuters’ myopic vision of African research capacity

1 Reply

T S Eliot’s damning metaphor for the narrowness of social conventions came to mind when I read Thomson Reuters’ Global Research Report Africa, ostensibly a report on the state of African research, but in fact a very limited analysis based solely on the performance of African countries in the Thomson Reuters ISI journal indexes. I was alerted to this report by University World News, which has now published two totally uncritical articles on Thomson Reuters’ ‘global’ analysis of African research.
This is insidious stuff. The Global Research Report Africa is indeed measuring out the lives of African researchers in coffee spoons, basing itself on an unproblematized assumption that the number of journal articles published and citation analysis of these articles can be an adequate measure (let alone the only measure) of the state of national research systems in Africa. It uses scientific-sounding language to equate these ‘outputs’ – ISI-listed journal articles – with research capacity and then in turn equate this measure with the potential for improved global economic performance for African countries.
The intent of this this report is pretty clear. The report starts off with an explicit statement: it is designed ‘to inform policymakers and others about the landscape and dynamics of the global research base’. Although its concluding remarks have a modest disclaimer, that ‘it would be inappropriate to suggest that the preliminary analysis in this report can provide a clear direction’, nevertheless the intent is again made clear – to ‘help provide a further context to that set by the OECD’s economic reports, while also furnishing background against which to view the pertinent regional dispatches in the UNESCO Science report 2010…’ We should not forget either that the criteria and analysis for the Times Higher Education university rankings are now to be managed by Thomson Reuters. Is the company positioning itself even more strongly as the sole arbiter of scholarly excellence and the sole source of data for the measurement of research development? Continue reading →

Why do scientists do research? Personal motivation, social impact and politics

Leave a reply

A thoughtful and thought-provoking blog by Cameron Neylon, a bioscientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK tackles the question of values and motivations in scientific research and the question of public support for science, through government and taxpayers. His major topic is why and how he does research and why there should be public support for this activity. But most tellingly he tackles cogently the dislocation that has happened in the 21st century between motivated scientists, their methods of carrying out and reporting on their research and the public policies that recognize this research effort.  The picture Neylon  paints of his own research – methodology to study complex biological structures – is of a high technology, collaborative and multinational research environment, in which scientists build on each others’ work in an open environment.

This is germane to our South African context, in which government policy on reward and recognition systems for individual researchers and universities does not seem to recognise the ways in which research has changed in the knowledge economy and how social and development impact can be delivered these days. With the IPR Act about to be enforced, this is even more of a burning issue for South African researchers. Neylon paints a picture of a post-war policy approach that treats science as a way of dealing with threats… ‘The war against cancer, the war against climate change. But evaluating his own research motivations, he identifies the need to make a positive impact on the world as his main driver. And the most effective way to do this, he argues, is by collaboration:

Because I want my work to be used as far as is possible I make as much as possible of it freely available. Again I am lucky that I live now when the internet makes this kind of publishing possible. We have services that enable us to easily publish ideas, data, media, and process and I can push a wide variety of objects onto the web for people to use if they so wish. Even better than that I can work on developing tools and systems that help other people to do this effectively. If I can have a bigger impact by enabling other peoples research then I can multiply that again by helping other people to share that research. But here we start to run into problems. Publishing is easy. But sharing is not so easy. I can push to the web, but is anyone listening? And if they are, can they understand what I am saying?


… More open research will be more effective, more efficient, and provide better value for the taxpayer’s money. But more importantly I believe it is the only credible way to negotiate a new consensus [sic] on the public funding of research. We need an honest conversation with government and the wider community about why research is valuable, what the outcomes are, and how the contribute to our society. We can’t do that if the majority cannot even see those outcomes. …

At a social level, he argues that this is a technical and legal issue, and one of interoperability: sharing through agreed formats and vocabularies and using licences that do not place barriers in the way of mutual use of data. Process interoperability is even more important: ‘If the object we publish are to be useful then they must be able to fit into the processes that researchers actually use.’

But there are challenges at the political level: what scientists do and how they do it is not evident to the public that funds research and this could lead to a failure of funding – a real risk in the South African context, where the credibility gap is probably even wider than in the UK.


We need at core a much more sophisticated conversation with the wider community about the benefits that research brings; to the economy, to health, to the environment, to education. And we need a much more rational conversation within the research community as to how those different forms of impact are and should be tensioned against each other.  We need in short a complete overhaul if not a replacement of the post-war consensus on public funding of research. My fear is that without this the current funding squeeze will turn into a long term decline. And that without some serious self-examination the current self-indulgent bleating of the research community is unlikely to increase popular support for public research funding.


In a South African university sector which is driven by recognition based on journal articles and in which there tends to be a handful of public intellectuals who convey the broader results of scientific research to the government and the public, we could do worse than engage in the way that Neylon suggests with the potential that we have in a technological age to open up the whole of the research process, making for the maximum usage of the research that is produced. This is of vital importance in  the African research environment, where failures in effective communication means that we are constantly reinventing the wheel with frighteningly scarce resources. But even if we focus only on South Africa, where the new Minster of Higher Education and Technology is asking what has happened to research for the public good in South Africa, we could do worse than heed Neylon’s words.



We need an honest conversation with government and the wider community about why research is valuable, what the outcomes are, and how the contribute to our society. We can’t do that if the majority cannot even see those outcomes. The wider community is more sophisticated that we give it credit for. And in many ways the research community is less sophisticated than we think. We are all “the public”. If we don’t trust the public to understand why and how we do research, if we don’t trust ourselves to communicate the excitement and importance of our work effectively, then I don’t see why we deserve to be trusted to spend that money.

Read the whole blog – it is  essential reading in our current political and social climate.


Winds of change – ivy league universities make mileage from open access

Leave a reply

2009 might turn out to be the year in which the tipping point has been reached in scholarly publishing. There is an increasing tide of criticism of conventional, commercially-driven journal publishing and its systems for evaluating and ranking scholars and universities.  For example in a scathing article published in Times Higher Education last month Sir John Sulston, chairman of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester, and Nobel prizewinner in the physiology or medicine category in 2002 is quoted as saying  ‘[Journal metrics] are the disease of our times.’

But it is a crystal-clear spring day in Cape Town today, so let’s opt for the good news. And that is that Harvard and four other leading universities in the US are leveraging considerable strategic benefit from adopting open access.  Harvard has launched DASH,

its open access repository; a group of 5 leading universities, including Harvard, have launched a Compact for Open Access Publication; and, in support of this Compact, Harvard has developed  HOPE – its policy for the management of for funding support for open access publication.  This is a policy that could well serve as a model for universities wanting to tackle this issue.

From a South African perspective, do our leading research universities, which currently compete fiercely to get journal articles into the journal indexes in order to corner a place in international university rankings, need to start rethinking their strategies to concentrate more on providing access to their scholarship? And given that South African universities are in even greater need of getting readership for their research and suffer much more than the well-endowed US institutions from ever-escalating subscription costs, should we not be more active in our support for open access authorship?

What is striking in Harvard University’s announcement of the launch of its open access repository, DASH, is the way the university is using this launch as a powerful marketing exercise to promote the contribution that open access can make to profiling the quality of its scholarship:

“DASH is meant to promote openness in general,” stated Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library. “It will make the current scholarship of Harvard’s faculty freely available everywhere in the world, just as the digitization of the books in Harvard’s library will make learning accumulated since 1638 accessible worldwide. Taken together, these and other projects represent a commitment by Harvard to share its intellectual wealth.”

Visitors to DASH (http://dash.harvard.edu) can locate, read, and use some of the most up-to-the minute scholarship that Harvard has to offer. DASH users can read “Anticipating One’s Troubles: The Costs and Benefits of Negative Expectations” by Harvard College Professor Dan Gilbert. Markus Meister, Jeff C. Tarr Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, weighs in with “LED Arrays as Cost-Effective and Efficient Light Sources for Widefield Microscopy,” while Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow asks “After Brown: What Would Martin Luther King Say?”

From Abu Ghraib to zooarchaeology, from American literature to the Zeeman effect, more than 1,500 items can be located in DASH today, with the number increasing every week. As vital as the repository is to current work, DASH also houses a growing number of retrospective articles and papers. Contributors include Harvard President Drew Faust and University professors Robert Darnton, Peter Galison, Stanley Hoffman, Barry Mazur, Stephen Owen, Amartya Sen, Irwin Shapiro, Helen Vendler, and George Whitesides.

The Compact for Open Access Publishing has been launched by Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, and the University of California, Berkeley. In the first instance, this is profiled as a public good intervention, but it also takes account of the increasing pressure that is being placed on library budgets and hence on access to research, as a result of rising journal costs in a recessionary climate. A key goal of the compact is to ensure that universities have in place support mechanisms to provide funding for scholarly authors publishing in open access journals, in those cases where author fees are charged. This is seen as a way of levelling the playing fields:

‘The compact supports equity of the business models by committing each university to the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication fees for open-access journal articles written by its faculty for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds.’

This is a conscious effort to plot a path from an old model to a new. In an interview on the launch of DASH and the Compact for Open Access publishing, Stuart Schieber, Director of the Office of Scholarly Communications at Harvard, is clear – and as articulate as ever, about the need to change the system:

Scholarly publishing is going through a transformation as a result of systemic problems in the underlying business models, which have led to a spiral of hyperinflating costs, journal cancellations, and reducing access to the scholarly literature. With the economic downturn, this access problem will only be exacerbated. DASH is an attempt to solve the symptom of reduced access, at least to our own articles. But we need to turn our attention to the underlying problem, to find sustainable alternatives to the dysfunctional subscription-based business model that has supported journal publishing in the past.

Over the decades, academia has established a substantial infrastructure to support scholarly publication based on that business model—publishers to manage logistics and production, subscription agents to handle order processing, library budgets to pay for the subscriptions, overhead from grants to fund those library budgets, and so forth. We need to start establishing the infrastructure to support alternative models, and to get the mechanisms of scholarly communication on a sound, sustainable footing.

There are lessons to be learned all around, here, about the ways in which the world’s leading universities address their strategic goals.

Collaborative and open innovation in the global limelight

Leave a reply

June was a hectic month. (That sounds like a parody of TS Eliot, but it really was a hectic month.) There is a lot to catch up with, so I will provide a series of posts, on a variety of topics. The general message seems to be that times are a-changing and that there is an increasing dynamic weight behind open access and open innovation approaches, particularly (but not only) for developing countries. With the major international organisations weighing in and with our new Minister of Higher Education joining the debate at UNESCO, these are indeed interesting times.

As a follow-on from the discussion of innovation and the SA IPR Act in recent blog postings, a  week-old UN debate is relevant, showing up yet again how much the SA legislation seems to be going against global trends.

The  Intellectual Property Watch Newsletter 0f 6 July reported that ‘innovation and technology will be key to emergence from the global economic crisis, according to speakers at a recent United Nations conference on innovation-based competitiveness. However, innovation should be collaborative and involve resources inside and outside companies and institutions.’
The “International Conference on Technological Readiness for Innovation-based Competitiveness” was organised by the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) on 29-30 June. According to the IP Watch report, a number of speakers at this conference spoke about the need for collaborative innovation, or what  Paula Wasowska, director for Central and Eastern Europe market development for Cisco Systems, described as “connected innovation.”  Connected innovation requires cultural change to collaborative sharing of information, skills and perspectives within organisations and between them, the customers and the partners. “Innovation happens when people work together,” she is reported as saying.

“Innovation is moving from the in-house to the connected global market place, from the isolated individuals to collaborative environment…from proprietary control to open source, from single specialties to multidisciplinary perspective,” she said, and customers have become a critical force of competitive data as they are an invaluable force of information.

In general, this conference seemed to signal the  general acceptance of a shift from a competitive approach to innovation to a collaborative one, even where the mega-corporations like Microsoft and Intel are concerned. This collaboration takes place in and between companies and non-commercial organisations. The ethos, as Wasowska points out, is one of open sharing.

Even more striking was the statement by Claran McGinley, controller at the European Patent Office, that the patent system for ICTs is not working. The important thing about open innovation McGinley is reported as saying, is that “it is a team effort and crosses boundaries.”

The full IP Watch report can be found here.

The Universiy of Pretoria adopts an open access mandate

Leave a reply

The University of Pretoria has become the first university in South Africa to adopt a mandate for open access deposit of publications by all academics. The senate of the University of Pretoria has unanimously approved an open access mandate for the university, which requires all academics to deposit digital copies of their publications in an open access archive. The policy will go into effect immediately and it is likely that UP scholars will see a substantial increase in the citation of their articles as a result. Other South African Universities will need to watch this space.

The wording of  the policy:

To assist the University of Pretoria in providing open access to scholarly articles resulting from research done at the University, supported by public funding, staff and students are required to:

  • submit peer-reviewed postprints* + the metadata of their articles to UPSpace, the University’s institutional repository, AND
  • give the University permission to make the content freely available and to take necessary steps to preserve files in perpetuity.

Postprints are to be submitted immediately upon acceptance for publication.

The University of Pretoria requires its researchers to comply with the policies of research funders such as the Wellcome Trust with regard to open access archiving. Postprints of these articles are not excluded from the UP mandate and should first be submitted as described in (1). Information on funders’ policies is available at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/.

Access to the full text of articles will be subject to publisher permissions. Access will not be provided if permission is in doubt or not available. In such cases, an abstract will be made available for external internet searches to achieve maximum research visibility. Access to the full text will be suppressed for a period if such an embargo is prescribed by the publisher or funder.

The Open Scholarship Office will take responsibility for adhering to archiving policies of publishers and research funders, and managing the system’s embargo facility to delay public visibility to meet their requirements.

The University of Pretoria strongly recommends that transfer of copyright be avoided. Researchers are encouraged to negotiate copyright terms with publishers when the publisher does not allow archiving, reuse and sharing. This can be done by adding the official UP author addendum to a publishing contract.

The University of Pretoria encourages its authors to publish their research articles in open access journals that are accredited.

Starting in 2004 with an evaluation of appropriate repository software, and going live in 2006 with UPSpace, UP has established itself as a pioneer and a leader in the development and management of scholarly repositories in South Africa. The university at that time already had a thesis and dissertations repository, UPeTD, started in 2000 and expanded in 2004 with a mandate for the online deposit of theses and dissertations. The decision to expand this intervention to create a repository of research collections followed on the success that UPeTD had in profiling PhD students’ research, contributing to their career success and providing expanded readership for UP’s research output.

The project was resourced with the creation of a repository management team to oversee the implementation and ongoing management of UPSpace. There are now 7 896 full text items online, profiling the research output and publications of departments and individual academics, who have their own profiles within the repository, which can be linked to their CVs. The online publications can range from public scholarship and media articles to research papers and formal scholarly publications. The latter are collected in a sub-space of the broader collection, called openUP.

The initial reluctance of UP scholars to embrace open access has long been overcome and with Senate’s willingness to vote a mandate for deposit, it is clear that there is now top-level support for the initiative. It will be interesting to watch the impact that this has on UP’s research profile and scholarly reputation, which is likely to be enhanced by increased access. Research shows that online open access to research publications from developing countries considerably increases impact factors by a considerable margin.

Congratulations to UP for a bold initiative that puts in in the front rank among some of the leading universities in the world.

For an account of the setting up of the UP repositories, seeMartie van Deventer and Heila Pienaar, South Arfican Repositories: Brigding the knoweldge divides. Ariadne 55 2008