Category Archives: Policy

Excellence or quality – metrics and values in scholarly communications

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In June 2009, in the process of scoping a project to research ways of building capacity in African scholarly publishing, a workshop was held with a group of experts from a variety of perspectives and a variety of approaches to the question of scholarly communications. Supported by the IDRC and the Shuttleworth Foundation, this workshop turned out a very lively event and – we believe – provided seminal insights into the questions that need to be addressed in order to build African research communications capacity.
This workshop has now been captured on a website that hosts videos of the keynote speeches (ten minute presentations, so they work well this way). It also contains commentary on the speeches and discussions as well as the key findings that emerged from this discussion. The website was funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation and provides a discussion form for these ideas to be carried forward. One lesson learned, perhaps, was the value of discussion in a a small and focused group of experts from a variety of contexts and a variety of specialisations.
In yesterday’s blog I took to task the Thomson Reuters analysis of African research developments, arguing that, by focusing only on the production of journal articles and on citations in an international journal index, they were taking too narrow a view of what constituted research development. So here, from the Scholarly Communications, is the keynote address by Jean-Claude Guédon, of the University of Montreal, who gave the opening address of the workshop.

Jean-Claude Guédon – Scholarly Communication in Africa: Project Scoping Workshop from Creative R&D on Vimeo.

Guédon starts by introducing vocabulary issues that need to be clarified on order to understand the research communications environment. In particular, the difficulty in discerning the difference between ‘quality’ and ‘excellence.’ According to Jean-Claude, quality is a matter of the minimum thresholds that are needed for functionality, a matter of what skills or levels of professionalism are needed to deliver a particular function. The concept of excellence, on the other hand, is a matter of competition, with specifically defined parameters creating the rules of the game in which this competition is played out.
He continues to the topic of scholarly publishing, which has artificially constructed competition as its basis, so that it has become all about creating excellence. Jean-Claude’s advice is to disengage from this situation, by reviewing the notion of what constitutes excellence. He also says we need to look at the whole value chain of scientific communications, as well as the data that underpins research and ensure that it is preserved and made available. He also speaks about the benefits of a collaborative knowledge environment, as well as the need to reposition knowledge and society.
The message is that we need to unpack the language of excellence and competitiveness before we subscribe too blindly to the race that that involves. Developing countries cannot ignore this side of scholarly performance and it is important that they prove their ability to achieve the accepted standards of performance in what has become, for better or for worse, a dominant measure. However, this should not be expanded to be the only, or the dominant measure of performance. Rather, there should be a balanced approach, with great emphasis placed on the need to build capacity by developing the quality standards that could ensure truly professional performance.

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

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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 →

Scholarly publishing as a transformation issue in South Africa

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With the Higher Education Transformation Summit taking place in Cape Town on 22 April, universities have been in a reflective phase, examining their success – or lack of it – in achieving post-apartheid transformation. The report card shows that we are achieving a great deal, but could try harder. There is still a way to go before all our students and academics feel they are in institutions that are really their home.
No-one seems to have noticed the elephant in the room. In all the discussions, I see very little attention being paid to the role that scholarly communication and publication plays in the transformation process. We talk about the demographic profiles of our universities, yet we do not seem to question the communication environment that students and staff are immersed in and the values that are reflected there.
Why is it, for example, that, as the South African Minister of Higher Education and Training , Blade Nzimande, complained at the UNESCO 29th World Conference on Higher Education that ‘there is a gender imbalance throughout higher education systems especially in leadership positions.’ in his keynote address at the Transformation Summit, he picked up on the fact that the average age of academics continues to rise and that there has been a drop in the number of staff under the age of 30? Does the publishing system that is so central in determining who is promoted and rewarded play a role in these demographics? Is this an alien environment for the young scholars that the universities want so badly to attract? Do students and researchers find their own, African, world reflected adequately in the scholarly resources that they have access to? Are the values that our researchers hold reflected in the ways in which they are supported in publishing their research? Continue reading →

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

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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.


Innovation policy

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The Australian federal government has just completed a review of its National Innovation system. Australian research and innovation policy-making tends to be broadly consultative, wide-ranging  and forward-looking, so I was interested to compare this with what the South African government is doing. Our IPR Act of 2008 is Bayh-Dole on steroids, insisting on commercialisation and patenting wherever possible, and apparently treating open innovation as the exception, not the rule. And speaking of rules, the Regulations impose layers of bureaucratic filters between the researcher and the innovation outcome.

I am still working through the Australian document to absorb its detail but it has some valuable insights and the overall thrust is clear: there needs to be a balanced system, in which commercialisation is but one strand of the innovation role that universities can play. Far from taking Bayh-Dole as gospel, there is a critical evaluation of such strategies and a re-evaluation of  what innovation policy should look like in the 21st century.

Moreover, the Australian government and the participants in the policy process are aware of the pitfalls in excessive patenting. They review the past record, warn against the damage that can be done by patent law that is not rigourous enough and advise against policies that could create patent thickets. Most interesting, there is a strong argument for this arena to be opened up, so that the participants in the innovation system have a strong say, rather than this being the exclusive domain of lawyers. This is a lesson that I think South African universities might need to learn – it appears that our academics are not engaging with the South African legislation, thinking that this is the domain of professionals.

This Australian policy document reminds me of a recommendation from Arie Rip at an  early stage of the South African higher education policy process (2000):

The common mimetic route is to define the nature of capacity-building in terms of what is now seen as important. This may well be a recipe to become obsolete before one’s time … [T]he world (of science and more generally) may well evolve in such a way that present-day exemplars will be left behind. So developing countries should set their sights on what is important in 2010, rather than what appears to be important now – however difficult this will be politically. 1

The IPR Act of 2008 is unfortunately trapped in the ‘mimetic route’ that Rip warns about here. But what about Australian thinking in 2009? Here are some extracts that give some insight into the thinking that will inform policy review down south:

On the commercialisation of research:

Research commercialisation is not a core role for universities. Nevertheless, universities can play a vital role in the commercial process. In cases where the benefits of research are best achieved through commercial engagement, universities should, where possible, attempt to partner with appropriate stakeholders to achieve these goals. Such instances are in the minority and universities more commonly play a role of commercial significance through provision of vital research advancement, workforce training and substantial international links.

On the protection of intellectual property rights:

[T]here is a caveat which is increasingly important: The development of intellectual property is cumulative. In the words of Sir Isaac Newton, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Because new knowledge always builds on old knowledge, the property rights we have erected to encourage innovation can actually obstruct it.

On the need to open up the question of patenting and IP beyond the legal profession and the IP industries:

Nevertheless the consideration of policy … is dominated by IP practitioners and by the beneficiaries of the IP system. We need the expertise of lawyers in this as in many other areas of policy but it is imperative that IP policy make the transition that competition policy made over a decade ago now, from a specialist policy area dominated by lawyers, to an important front of micro-economic reform.

On access and dissemination for social and economic benefit

Along with the rise in support for access to information has come a growing recognition of the need for users to be able to search and interact with data and content. Legal frameworks must also be developed to facilitate access and reuse. This points to the need for an Australian National Information Policy (or Strategy) that optimizes the generation and flow of ideas and information in the Australian economy. As the National Competition Policy (NCP) involved systematically scanning Australian institutions to optimize the operation of competition to enhance outcomes so National Information Policy would scan Australian institutions to optimize the generation and dissemination of information for social and economic benefit.

Thus for instance, unless it seriously undermines its commercial objectives of sale of product, the ABC should err on the side of making its content available over theinternet unless this has large opportunity costs. The presumption against free availability might be overcome where it would involve the foregoing of substantial commercial revenue from the sale of the content or there are large costs of hosting the necessary internet bandwidth (although in this latter case, peer to peer means of distribution should also be explored as should the diversion of funding from other activities and/or additional funding).

The advantages of  open science

To drive cumulative knowledge creation researchers and others must have access to high quality data and information on developments not just in their field but beyond. For instance, Jeff Furman and Scott Stern have calculated that Biological Resource Centres that are repositories of biological materials (including cell lines, microorganisms and DNA material) have boosted cumulative scientific knowledge by three times more than alternative institutional structures 2.Australian physicist Michael Nielsen has stressed the importance of unlocking scientific information in scientific journals to make it more easily discoverable, searchable and useable to enable the cross-disciplinary search for knowledge:

We should aim to create an open scientific culture where as much information as possible is moved out of people’s heads and labs, onto the network, and into tools which can help us structure and filter the information. This means everything – data, scientific opinions, questions, ideas, folk knowledge, workflows, and everything else – the works. Information not on the network can’t do any good.3

There is a lot more in this report – I recommend that South African researchers read it as they engage with our legislative process with an eye to preserving their expertise and independence in the process of ensuring that their research has maximum national impact.

1. Rip, A. (2000) Fashions, Lock-ins and the Heterogeneity of Knowledge Production. In Kraak, A. (ed.) Changing Modes: New knowledge production and its implications for Higher Education in South Africa. Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council.

2. Furman, J. and Stern, S., Standing Atop the Shoulders of Giants: The Impact of Institutions on Cumulative Research, National Bureau Economic Research Working Paper. 2004.

3. http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/?p=448