Category Archives: Open Access

Genocide by Denial – An open access book from Uganda

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I have posted a blog in the PALM Africa blog site on an open access book from Fountain Publishers in Uganda, created as part of the PALM project. The timing of this publishing initiative is telling for us in South Africa, as the book deals with an issue that is directly releant to the Department of Science and Technology’s legislation and proposed Regulations aimed at forcing the commericlialisation of research. The impact of profit-driven commercialisation of public health research is an issue that this book takes apart in a searing critique.

From the PALM blog:

Fountain Publishers in Uganda has launched as its first open access book a powerful and moving indictment of the price in human lives that the global innovation system has extracted in sub-saharan Africa, written by the internationally respected AIDS specialist, Peter Mugyenyi. The book is Genocide by Denial: How profiteering from HIV/AIDS killed millions. This is the first demonstration project in the PALM Africa initiative and the response to the open acess book as well as its impact will be tracked and researched by the PALM team…

The book is a powerful indictment of a failed system, written with passion and clarity. from the AIDS disaster should help the world find a way of incorporating justice and human rights in business. It is glaringly clear that the ills of the present system need to be fixed. He appears to be vindicated by the fact that the WHO is now aligning itself with this approach. of – developing global policy. Mugyenyi’s book needs to be read by the South African bureaucrats who are trying to enforce widespread and rigid commercialization of public research. Mugyeni’s conclusion to his book puts the issues succinctly: The timing is impeccable, as the release of the open access version of the book coincides exactly with a breakthrough at the World Health Organisation, which has finally reached agreement on a global strategy and plan of action on public health, innovation and intellectual property. The WHO initiative, after long negotiations driven by developing countries, aims to address exactly the problem that Mugyenyi addresses – the excessively and unaffordably high prices of the drugs needed to treat neglected diseases in developing countries, driven by the global patenting system. In addition, it addresses the lack of adequate research on neglected diseases, also spawned by the profit-driven Intellectual propoerty regime supported by the developed world. Among the recommendations in the WHO  plan of action is government intervention to ensure voluntary sharing or research, open access publication repositories and open databases and compound libraries of medical research results. Thus Fountain’s engagement with open access publishing on a public health topic is right in line with – and ahead Laws that deny or delay access to life-saving and emergency drugs should be urgently addressed on the humanitarian principle of lives above profits, but without hurting the businesses. Innovation in the crucial area of human survival should not be entirely dependent on money-making and big business, but should primarily aim at the alleviation of all human suffering and saving lives as a basic minimum. This does not contradict fair trade. Business success and humanism are not incompatible It is just a big lie to suggest that humanity is too dim to find ways of rewarding innovation and discovery other than by holding the very weakest of our society at ransom. It is also untrue that the only way businesses can thrive is by cutthroat pursuit of profits under powerful and insensitive protective laws, irrespective of the misery caused and the trail of blood in their wake. Lessons learns more from thePALM blog, with further details of the book and its contents…

India Bayh-Dole legislation – a conspiracy theory?

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An article by Latha Jishnu in the Business Standard in India in mid 2008 provides a succinct account of the secretive progress of a piece of Bayh-Dole legislation in India. It sounds rather similar to our experience in South Africa. The Indian Act has subsequently been submitted to Parliament. The Bill was apparently being passed around the various ministries without much transparency when the text of the Bill was published on SpicyIP, an Oxford-based blog. Similar secrecy seems to have been reflected in the South African, process. Although the original draft of the SA Bill was published for comment and the universities’ criticisms of what many considered an unworkable system were noted, it was very difficult to lay hands on subsequent drafts. People I know trying to track the final draft only saw it after the Act was passed, although it appears from personal accounts that industry players were probably consulted in a workshop (in India there appears to have been a workshop for the chambers of commerce and industry).

Jishnu’s article concludes: Technology transfers can and do happen through many channels, and the diverse methods now in use would be restricted by the new law, says Abrol. Nistads is one of the one of the 38 institutes grouped under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) whose chief, Samir Brahmachari, has been advocating the open source system (reported several times in this column) of collaborative, incentive-based research. What we need is some informed debate on what is India’s best interest at this particular stage instead of going for a wholesale import of an American system that could prove ineffectual. Otherwise, we could be headed for a nuclear deal in our science establishment — corrosive, divisive and ultimately ineffective. A series of SpicyIP blogs goes into the Indian legislation in some detail. It sounds much like what we are facing: The Indian bill, much like its US equivalent is premised on the assumption that intellectual property rights are the best way to drive innovation. The more IP, the better for innovation. There is plenty of literature that casts strong doubt on this lopsided view. Additionally, we’re seeing some great alternatives to the IP model emerging. Indeed, even as we speak, international scholars and activists are debating the merits of incentivising innovation through a variety of alternative means including “prizes”, “advance purchase contracts” etc. Closer home, Dr Samir K Brahmachari, Director General of CSIR, India’s premier R&D body, has been advocating an open source model in drug discovery. This is not to suggest that intellectual property rights (IPR’s) are bad in any way, but only to caution that IPR’s are but one way of incentivising innovation. Given that we are dealing with innovation and creativity, we must be open to trying out some of these alternatives i.e. we need to innovate within our innovation regimes! Particular stress is placed on the damaging effect that this legislation could have on access to medicines in India, given the above. Like our South African legislation, the draft Indian Bill also takes away the discretion of researchers and universities to make their own decisions on how best to make their research work for the public good. Both the decision to patent or a decision to use open approaches are subject to decision by a government office.

The Indian Acr aims to generate revenue through its provisions; however, SpicyIP argues, ‘In fact, the cost of operating a technology transfer office (TTO) often exceeds the money made from technology licensing. CSIR bears out this point well. While it generated approximately US$1 million in licensing revenues in 2004–2005, it spent more than twice that amount on filing patents.’

What is different in India is that there has been a strong activist movement, with a number of individuals and organisations tracking the progress of the Bill, unearthing copies of successive drafts, providing links to commentaries and analysis on Bayh-Dole in other countries  and generating debate. Useful for those who want to explore this issue in more depth.

But this particular budding conspiracy theorist, down on the southern tip of Africa, is asking why the secretive processes in both countries? And why does this legislation seem unstoppable? Is this a big-industry driven initiative and if, so given Obama’s view on scientific research development in last week’s speech, is this Reagon-style legislation what the US still wants?(1) And what of our new pro-poor government? What will our new Cabinet make of what they have been landed with?  Watch this space!

(1) It is to be noted that Professor Arti Rai, one of the authors of a very good article critical of  Bayh Dole’s relevance to developing countries is one of Obama’s IP advisors.

Repositories at UCT

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A new blog – OER@UCT – is charting the process of setting up an OER repository at UCT:

In the next few months we will be documenting our progress as we attempt to build a repository of UCT open resources.  We are trying to encourage faculty and students to contribute to our repository buy adopting Creative Commons licences which enables content to be easily shared.

The first blog (posted on 1 April, but no April Fool’s joke) has a nice quote about the impact of open resources:

“Open resources are the path to humility. They are an invitation to experimentation and collaboration. The more open the resource, the less one is committed to a single pedagogical path or theory, and the more one can profit from the insights of strangers, or collaborate with people one has never met.”  (Bissell, Doyle)

The OER@UCT blog has now posted an account of Hussein Suleman’s Teaching with Technology seminar last week at which he spoke on Open Access in a Closed Institution – Hussein’s view of UCT;s progress, or lack thereof, in creating an institutional research repository. From the OER@UCT blog:

Hussein spoke very briefly about the OA movement and some of the rather interesting developments in this area.  Large institutions around the world are pushing for open access and taking measures to ensure that their own research outputs are made available.  MIT (always a leader) has created a repository using the opensource dSpace software platform.  This also includes over 20,000 thesis going back as far as the 1800’s!!!
It makes good academic sense to do this.  For lecturers it creates an opportunity to collaborate and share research.  For students it provides access to high quality research and makes it easy for the growing “just google it” generation to do what they do best.

Have you ever been searching for an older news clipping, found it on the newspapers website, and then been asked to pay for the article?  I have found this incredibly irritating.  Why should I have to pay for old news?  This is an random rant – but the discussion really led me to think about it. …

Here at UCT the idea of an open access repository for research has been under discussion for some time.  Certainly our research output is scattered throughout the internet and in journals around the world, but can we account for it and provide details about it?  Can we tell how many times those articles have been cited, or read?  An open access digital archive could answer some of these questions.

Hussein says he had developed the UCT CS Research Document Archive for the Department of Computer Science here at UCT simply because he could not wait any longer for a university wide initiative to happen.  They now archive their publications and are able to provide details of how and when articles were accessed. The Law Faculty has also felt the need for a digital archive for their own research and have launched UCT Lawspace which also powers dSpace.  So it is clear that a unified system would be of great benefit if not only for these two faculties…

When I think of OER resources in the context of UCT I think of research output almost immediately.  Research papers, handbooks, conference papers, and articles will make a tremendous addition to our project.  Having them searchable and accessible will be of tremendous benefit in terms of reputation.

As Hussein reported in his talk, UCT is moving now to create an institutional repository, with funding from Carnegie. The question he raised was, Why has it taken so long?  and ‘Why does a university as prominent as UCT not invest in the creation of its own  repository rather than waiting for Carnegie to offer funding. It was clear from the information that Hussein provided that UCT has fallen badly behind other South African universities in adopting more open approaches to its research dissemination, with the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal the only other major South African university without an institutional repository.
One of my reflections on what Hussein was saying took was that there is a good deal of wastage in a university like UCT which produces very high quality research right along the spectrum of basic and applied research, but tends to favour the former in its research publication policy. The push at UCT is to get academics to publish as much as possible in  ‘internationally accredited’ publications. This is a dual push – to enhance the research prestige of the university through increased citation impact and to earn the very generous subsidies paid by the Department of Education for such publication. While there is a list of South African accredited journals, the statistics show that UCT – probably the country’s and the continent’s leading research university – tends to publish journal articles rather than books and to publish these articles predominantly in ISI listed journals. In UCT’s publication list submitted to the Department in 2005-6, only 78 out of 622 journal articles listed were in locally accredited journals. (There were 23 South African journals in the international indexes at that stage, so there would have been some overlap between local and international publication, but not much.)  In other words, to put it bluntly, given the profile of the journal industry that UCT favours, it exports most of its formal scholarly publication to commercial journals published by multinational conglomerates in the USA and Europe.
In the mean time, back home, our ever-inconsistent government, which pressurises South African universities to publish in this way in the name of global competitiveness, also berates those same universities for not doing enough to resolve our very pressing development issues, particularly unemployment and skills shortages. If one delves into the UCT record, it is clear that formidable levels of skill and intellect are being devoted to just such tasks. There are a large number of research units and collaborative research ventures devoted to interfacing high level basic research with community needs. These research units often publish a range of online policy papers, research reports,  discussion documents and data sets. Other units produce training materials and community handbooks. It is clear that the university has made a formidable contribution to policy development in health, poverty reduction, industrial and skills development, to name but a few.
Trying to find this rich record of research publication is, however, a mission. The publications are there, but buried in departmental websites that are in turn buried inside the university website. As good as this website is, this is just too many clicks away from discovery. The question I has to the senior administration was ‘UCT is a major player in the development of an AIDS vaccine in South Africa. Why, if you google AIDS vaccine South Africa, does UCT’s name not come up?’
Clearly, UCT could do a lot more using open access publishing, a strong repository system and some marketing of its wider range of publications, to demonstrate the contribution that is makes in return for taxpayer contributions.

The worlds leading universities move to open access

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South Africa’s leading research universities are very keen to compete in the international arena, ranking up comparative scores of international journal articles published and citation counts and jostling for research ratings (more on that tomorrow).

So, if we are competing with the big players internationally, what are they up to? A review of developments in open access in the last couple of months is a very telling insight into how the terrain might be changing – not that the citation counts have gone away, but that the big research universities seem to be recognising the strategic importance of open communications. The
universities concerned are quite hard nosed and not into empty gestures, so I imagine that their reasons for the actions they have taken are strategic, as was MIT’s decision to spend a lot of money opening up its educational resources to the world.

In the last couple of months:

Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted unanimously to grant the university a licence to make the faculty’s scholarly articles freely available online.The move was motivated in part by dissatisfaction with the copyright restrictions and the escalating cost of commercially published journals and in that mood, the move is to greater control of the university’s and its scholars’ own output. However, it is a also a firm commitment to the active and open dissemination of research:

“This is a large and very important step for scholars throughout the country. It should be a very powerful message to the academic community that we want and should have more control over how our work is used and disseminated,”â€ﾝ added Shieber, James O. Welch, Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science.

“The goal of university research is the creation, dissemination, and preservation of knowledge. At Harvard, where so much of our research is of global significance, we have an essential responsibility to distribute the fruits of our
scholarship as widely as possible,” said Steven E. Hyman, provost. “Today’s action in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences
will promote free and open access to significant, ongoing research. It is a first step in the creation of an open-access environment for current research that may one day provide the widest possible
dissemination of Harvard’s distinguished faculties’ work,” he added.

Shortly afterwards, the Harvard Faculty of Law followed suit, committing to make articles authored by faculty available free online. Harvard University is now creating an Office for Scholarly Communications, situated in the university libraries, under the aegis of the historian Robert Darnton. (perhaps emulatingthe University of California’s similarly-named position). This office will ensure that faculty, when signing publishing agreements, will do so in such a way as to best serve the public interest. The Office will also oversee the creation of a repository for university publications.

The motivations for all of these moves talk of the prestige of Harvard research and the need to make it available globally. Clearly Harvard sees opening its intellectual capital as a good way of advancing its research mission and profiling the university.

In June 2008, at the ElPub conference in Toronto, John Willinsky announced that the Stanford University School of Education had emulated Harvard in passing a unanimous motion for a mandate for the open access deposit of research
articles. (See the account in Peter Suber’s Open Access News and the report in the SPARCnewsletter) The Stanford School of Humanities and Science is now considering a similar mandate, Peter Suber reports.

Also inspired by Harvard, the Vice-Chancellor of Macquarie University has proposed to the university that they adopt and Open Access policy. Details are in his blog (he has a blog, take note!) And Michigan University has created Open Michigan, which provides a gateway to a wide variety of university resources (via Peter Suber’s blog). It includes open education resources, open software and open publishing and archives. Again, this is a strategic initiative: as the university describes it:

With a common goal of opening resources for teaching, learning and research for use and enhancement by a global community, these projects increase the value of those resources to U-M and the world. Open.Michigan provides a
clear view of the many places and ways U-M contributes to our world’s knowledge and creates exemplary resources for education and research.

That is just a few months’ worth in the US. The question is, ‘What are we doing at UCT? And in South Africa more generally?’

Stealing Empire – read, listen and join the subversion

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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.”