Category Archives: Open Access

Patents and open science – and that Bill again!

Leave a reply

Today is the last day for submissions on the Draft Bill for IPR for Publicly Funded Research. So it was good to see a very balanced and insightful article, Sharing the fruits of science by Glerry Toomey in University Affairs on the question of patents and the value of open science. In contrast to the obsessive insistence of the South African Draft Bill on patenting everything that can be patented and on commercialisation as the only way of getting benefit from research, Toomey makes it clear that international science is now taking other directions:

We … know that the social behaviour of modern science, and of the broader domain of innovation, is marked by a continual tug-of-war. At one end of the rope we find the forces of collaboration and sharing. At the other end are the instincts to compete and to protect one’s hard-earned intellectual property. While both kinds of behaviour lubricate scientific discovery and technological innovation, IP protection via patenting, with a view to future profits, has become a dominant trend in recent decades, particularly in the life sciences.

But now an international scientific counterculture is emerging. Often referred to as “open science,” this growing movement proposes that we err on the side of collaboration and sharing. That’s especially true when it comes to creating and using the basic scientific tools needed both for downstream innovation and for solving broader human problems.

Patenting has a role to play, the article argues, but the mistake that has been made in recent years is a failure to ‘distinguish between the research tools and basic knowledge’ of science and the inventions with industrial application that the patent system was designed for.

The article tracks a number of open science projects and links these to the recognition of scientific discovery as the generator of public good. He quotes at length Dr Richard Jefferson, a biotechnologist now living in Australia, the founder of an international research unit in Canberra called CAMBIA, which promotes open science.

Dr. Jefferson distinguishes between the development of basic scientific tools and the application of those tools, between “discovery and invention.” He sees scientific discovery as a social enterprise – not only serving as midwife to marketable inventions, but also delivering publicly valuable products for which markets or profit margins may be small. That includes alleviating poverty and hunger, especially in the developing countries, preventing or curing the diseases of the disadvantaged, and improving human stewardship of natural resources. So, while open science is described as a pragmatic way of doing research, it also has a social and ethical backbone. Terms like global public goods, common heritage of humankind and human rights recur in the literature on open science.

This would seem to be very much in line with the policy of the Department of Science and Technology, which argues for the need for research to contribute to national upliftment. On the other hand, Toomey claims, the commercialisation of public research, driven by the Bayh-Dole Act in the US some 27 years ago led to a ‘filing frenzy’ resulting in a tendency to privatise the tools and platforms of science.

This has not povided beneficial to the universities:

For universities in the technologically advanced countries, says Dr. Jefferson, the promise of getting fat cheques in the mail from patenting the fruits of their biosciences research projects has simply not materialized. He maintains that offices of technology transfer are “generally losing money” and that there’s ample evidence that private biotechnology enterprises, as a commercial industry, have fallen flat as well.

The article ends by suggesting that there needs to be a total rethink of the role of intellectual property, as a powerful tool for creating social value, through providing the platforms and sharing the improvements that result.

I would suggest that the South African Department of Science and technology needs to consider these arguments before enacting any legislation on IPR rights in university research. In promoting a Bill that looks backwards to 25-year-old US legislation, proven to have had many negative consequences; in insisting on a very wide-ranging definition of what research needs to be protected for patenting purposes, the Department would be locking the country into a backward-looking paradigm, just when exciting new prospects are available for delivering real development impact from public research.

Thanks to Peter Suber’s Open Access News for drawing my attention to this article

ASSAf Journal Editors Forum holds its inugural meeting

Leave a reply

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.

African Universities Leaders Forum proceedings now online

Leave a reply

A lot of interest was shown among my colleagues in a variety of organisations in the Frontiers of Knowledge Forum hosted by the University of Cape Town last November – another sign of the increased activity in African higher education and the particular interest in the role of ICT in African higher education. The Partnership for Higher Education in Africa (PHEA), which sponsored the forum, has now put the Forum documentation online, so that there is a full record available of the proceedings, the papers delivered, and the recommendations of the Forum. The documents also include a commissioned paper by Dick Ng’ambi of the Centre for Educational Technology at UCT on ICT and economic development in Africa; the role of higher education institutions.

This was the inaugural meeting of the African University Leaders Forum at which Vice-Chancellors of fifteen African Universities met in Cape Town to discuss the role of higher education in promoting economic growth in Africa. They focused in particular – to quote the website – ‘on the immense potential of information and communication technologies to transform the teaching, learning, and research environments in African universities, and the capacity of those technologies to stimulate large changes in Africa’s growing economies.’

The Forum took an aggressive line on the need for connectivity and broadband access in African universities as a basic requirement for national advancement – rather than a luxury. There was general agreement on the need to grow the level of African research output and to disseminate it better. In the in the final recommendations, the recommendation for the management of African knowledge contains an implicit endorsement of communication technologies open access:

African higher education institutions can play a leadership role in developing new institutions and business models for knowledge dissemination at the African and global levels. Some of the existing North American and European institutions can act as barriers to realizing the potential of African knowledge, and are under severe pressure themselves from the advance of open source and open access approaches.

Another recommendation was that African universities should ‘also develop new ways to take advantage of the increasing availability and quality of open educational resources at the international level.’

These are the challenges identified by the vice-chancellors at the close of the Forum:

  • Africa’s greatest asset is its human talent
  • Harnessing this talent will require new and large investment at all levels of education
  • Information and knowledge are the greatest contemporary levers of sustainable development
  • This recognition underscores the cardinal role of higher education
  • The
    fullest benefits of higher education will be in greater equitable
    access, high quality teaching and research infrastructure, greater
    institutional autonomy within a framework of public accountability
  • Greater
    economic growth will occur in a more participative human environment
    and in more deregulated economies which allow for greater social
    inventiveness
  • A key historic feature of modern Africa is the emergent and increasingly vibrant African private sector
  • African higher education must engage closely with this emergent sector
  • Working
    with government, the private sector, and civil society, higher
    education must press for a high intensity information and communication
    technology environment across the African continent
  • Networked African universities must consolidate their role at the centre of a new and changing continent

iCommons grows up – what measures for success?

Leave a reply

I blogged a few articles on the iCommons blog in Dubrovnik over the last few days. Here is a link to a reflection on how one judges the success of free culture projects in a rapidly-maturing community.

What to expect from the opening plenary of a conference that is essentially about copyright? Only a few years ago it would have been a stuffy hall at the London Book Fair, in the dingy surrounds of Olympia on a rainy Saturday in April. The experts in their suits would drone on, assuming the reassuring earnestness of a doctor’s bedside manner to tell us how successful they had been in prosecuting the pirates in India and how China was beginning to be copyright observant. The most dramatic we could hope for was an alarmist display of web pages showing the speed and effectiveness of the burgeoning informal online pirate economy.

Not so here at the second iCommons Summit. First of all, iCommons goes for stunning settings – last year on Copacabana Beach in Rio, this weekend in the Revelin Fort on the edge of Dubrovnik old town. This means that we come into the conference hall with the smell of pine resin in our nostrils, slightly dazzled by the brilliance of the white boats in the harbour and early morning sun reflecting off the blond stone of the old city. What we were treated to when we got inside was a bravura display from a movement that in one brief year is displaying a new confidence in the success of its alternative creative vision.

The beautiful settings hide something else that emerged very strongly in the opening plenary session and that is that iCommons is a truly global, polyglot community. It is no accident that the conferences happen in places that are off the major beat of the USA and Europe – or even the Asian industrialised powerhouses. it means that iCommons can specialize in the off-beat. It would be a mistake, though, to think that this offbeat quality means that it is lightweight. it is all a matter of how one measures success.

A free education world explored in a fortress by the sea

Leave a reply

iCommons has a talent for holding its conferences in beautiful places. Last year it was Copacabana Beach in Rio. This year we met in Dubrovnik, in the Revelin fortress on the edge of the centuries-old city walls. Very different to Rio, but some similarities – an intensely blue Adriatic sea, muggy heat, a laid-back atmosphere. But there the similarities ended. Dubrovnik is very much a European city, perhaps even surprisingly so, given its location on the far edge of a Mediterranean culture. In some ways it feels more Germanic than Southern, with its pristine city walls in blond stone, impeccably restored after the war with Serbia and Montenegro, and its gleaming polished marble streets in the old town. But then there are the villas climbing steep hills behind the old town, the patches of brilliant colour from flowering trees, the grape vine pergolas over sea-facing terraces, the scent of pine resin over cafe tables and the olive green foliage of the islands – all this is decidedly southern.

The conference rooms in the Revelin fortress were all in blond stone, with vaulted stone ceilings, soft light and shadows. Ironical perhaps that this was the setting for an often passionate discussion about the nature of free culture, often anarchic, never boring. It is hard to capture the spirit of what was this year a diverse event, from deep intellectual discussion to presentations by free culture radicals, to the workshop sessions of the Open Education stream. This challenged the formal conference structure of the rest of the Summit, with its more rigid panel discussions, where expert opinions provided a framework of authority and response. Instead, the nature of Open Education was explored in what some speculated might be a subversive symbolic setting, the Lazar-house set on the rocks over Dubrovnik’s most fashionable beach.

The discussions led with gusto by Allen Gunn revealed a wide diversity of views from a global patchwork of people. What emerged was the capacity to reconcile the sometimes extreme dogmatic views about what constitutes Open Education, whether the dogmatism be free content, open source software, collaborative communities, or whatever. The workshop context allowed discussion of these diverging views and, above all, the emergence of a much more complex and pedagogically-informed
tapestry of the potential that could be offered by Open Education in a variety of geographical and educational contexts. It is much more than just content, the participants agreed. Also, they concurred, there has been too little attention paid
to informal education and lifelong learning, the possibilities offered for mature learners.

The process was sometimes anarchic – go to Steve Foersters blog on the speed-geeking session on the iCommons website, or look at the podcast of the workshop participants acting out open education as a flight of geese. As is familiar to many educationists, a collaborative workshopping process like this one can be playful, but the results are often more serious and complex that earnest discussion can be. Perhaps this is a model for future Commons conferencing (along the lines that I believe Sakai has taken). This has opened up a blog discussion on the iCommons site – it will be interesting to see where this leads.

The workshop participants commented rather acerbically that the panel discussion on Open Education held in the main stream of the conference did not contain one teacher. But was acknowledged was that this was the one stream that produced a
series of concrete recommendations and projects for tracking in iCommons 2008 in Tokio.

There is a plethora of blog articles on the new iCommons site – see the education track on the iCommons blog for a wide-ranging discussion of the issues.