Category Archives: Policy

Research Publication Policy in South Africa

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I have now completed my year as an International Policy Fellow of the Open Society Institute (Budapest) and the Policy Paper resulting from the year’s investigation, Achieving Research Impact for Development: A Critique of Research Dissemination Policy in South Africa , is now available on my IPF website. I hope that this detailed evaluation of South African research policy and the recommendations for policy change will trigger debate among South African academics. Here is the Abstract, which outlines some of the paper’s findings:


This paper reviews the policy context for research publication in South Africa, using South Africa’s relatively privileged status as an African country and its elaborated research policy environment as a testing ground for what might be achieved – or what needs to be avoided – in other African countries. The policy review takes place
against the background of a global scholarly publishing system in which African knowledge is seriously marginalised and is poorly represented in global scholarly output. Scholarly publishing policies that drive the dissemination of African research into international journals that are not accessible in developing countries because of their high cost, effectively inhibit the ability of relevant research to impact on the overwhelming development challenges that face the continent.

In this study, South African research policy is tracked against the changing context provided by digital communication technologies and new dissemination models, particularly Open Access. These impact not only on publication but also on the way that research is carried out and they bring with them a growing recognition
of the value, particularly for developing countries, of non-market and non-proprietary production in delivering research impact. The paper thus pays particular attention to the potential for new technologies and new publishing models in helping to overcome the global knowledge divide and in offering solutions for what might at first sight appear to be intractable problems of under-resourcing and a lack of sustainability for African research publication.

The argument of the paper is that there is, in the formulation of research policy, a largely uncharted clash between South African national research and innovation policies focused on development and access on the one side, and the traditionally-accepted model of academic publishing on the other. The traditional publishing model has, as its core value, enhancement of the reputation of the individual scholar and his or her institution. In following this model, South Africa is typical: there is a signal failure of research policy to focus on the question of
the swift dissemination of research results, through Open Access publishing, especially to places where these results could have a useful impact – caused by a set of largely unexamined assumptions about academic publishing. It is in the developing world, and perhaps most markedly in Africa, that the negative effect of this
set of contradictions is demonstrated most clearly.

The paper charts a set of conflicting expectations of academic institutions and their values in research policies. On the one hand, the government has an expectation of social and development impact from the university in return for its investment in research funding. At the same time, there are increased pressures towards privatisation of the universities, with a decline in traditional financial support from the state and, linked to this,
pressure on the university to demonstrate results in the form of greater Intellectual Property Rights enclosure. Thus, while South African research and innovation policies stress the need for development impact, performance measures focus on patents or publication in internationally-indexed journals, effectively inhibiting the effective
dissemination of research and thus greatly retarding its potential development impact.

The paper makes recommendations at international, national and institutional levels for addressing this situation, arguing that Open Access and collaborative approaches could bring substantially increased impact for African research, with marked cost-benefit advantages.

ASSAf Journal Editors Forum holds its inugural meeting

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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.

Draft Bill for IPR in Publicly Funded Research (still open for comment) – a publishing perspective

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Those academics and researchers who have been away on vacation might not know that a Draft Bill on IPR in Publicly Funded Research was released for comment
a few weeks ago. The deadline for comment was very short – some ten days in the middle of the holidays. The contents of the Bill are dire – I have not spoken to anyone who is happy with what it says. For those newly returned to the treadmill, I posted blogs on the Bill on the 5th and 13th of July. The blog of 12 July describes some of the provisions of the Bill. Basically, it sets up a system in which any research that has patent potential must be submitted to the university IPR Office and all intellectual property rights (including all copyrights connected with the invention) are ceded to the university. If the university does not want to take a patent on the
research, then the rights go to the government. Worse, the Bill requires any research that might conceivably at some stage, be patentable, to be treated the same way. More, it requires all publications (which, the lawyers tell me, could include blogs and websites as well as formal publications) to be screened by the university IPR office before they can be published, just i case they might reveal something patentable. And then, if an employee of the university fails to report a piece of research that is patentable, she is subject to disciplinary procedures (and employees include students) But there is even more than this – go and read it.

At the very last moment, on the closing day for comment on this Bill, the deadline for comment was extended until 20 August. Not much consolation for colleagues who has worked through the night and lost two weekends working on replies, but a good thing nevertheless. The Bill has very serious implications for any South African researchers so, now that the university term has started, I hope that a greater number of you will become aware of it and let your universities – and the DST – know how this might affect your research.

As a publisher, I am concerned that this Bill, if enacted, could impact very negatively on scholarly publication. I find it hard to imagine how any university could cope with screening every publication before it can be submitted to a publisher or conference organiser. And, knowing how we all work to tight deadlines, I think that the need to write in several weeks of extra time before being able to submit any journal or conference paper could be a nightmare. Then, if the lawyers are right and the definition of ‘publication’ includes blogs and discussion forums, then even informal research communications would have to be screened. The potential costs are substantial – every publication would have to be read by an expert who would be able to discern if there is a potential patent hidden in the publication concerned. And screening would include not only the publications that are ultimately accepted, but also the very large number that are rejected. The university would have to become, at great expense, a very Big Brother, and all spontaneity in communication between researchers would be stifled. In a world in which collaborative research has become a necessity, this would be a serious backward drag on the very publication output that we are trying to expand.

Here is a comment from Dr Alma Swan, of Key Perspectives, a highly regarded consultancy in scholarly communications with a long list of very prominent clients, from the UK government and the European Union to the Public Library of Science and the Nature Publishing Group. She holds posts at Warwick Business School, and in the School of Electronics & Computer Science and the School of Management at the University of Southampton. Her comments are acerbic – she says that she was
having an irritable day, but I think she was entitled to this, given the content of this Bill:

Far from helping SA science and technology this Bill has the potential to slow it to walking pace while every article is checked for patent potential. How truly bizarre. Still, good news for South Africa’s competitors.

If I were an (international) funder I would steer clear of funding any SA research under this set of conditions. It will be a slowdown for OA, though presumably just a slowdown: it will hold up deposit and publication while each article is cleared. .The primary losers will be SA’s scientists, whose work gets held up when it is ready for publication – could mean the difference between being the first to publish on something or losing the race to someone else. At the very least, delaying publication means delayed impact, which is important to individuals (perhaps seeking jobs, tenure, etc) and certainly for the country. It seems a very odd development.

Given Alma’s status in the international world of scholarly communication, I would take this comment seriously.

The State of the Nation 3: Journal publishing in South Africa – the green or gold route in the country of gold?

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Quite a spat has broken out in open Access circles about whether it would be better to take the ‘green route’ to open access mandating open repositories, or more effective to go for the ‘gold route’ of developing open access journals. Stevan Harnad was infuriated by Jan Velterop’s statement that ‘the “cure” of open access publishing is to be preferred to the “palliative” of self-archiving’ and has written an angry reponse. I have followed with interest the preceding, more considered, debate in Velterop’s blog, The Parachute and Harnad’s Open Access Archivangelism, because I am, like Velterop, a publisher by background and appreciate his intelligent ability to balance the need for access and the realities of publishing and because I admire Harnad’s intellect and passion for the cause of Open Access.

The debate made me step back and rethink my approach to green and gold (the colours of our national sports teams, by the way) in this major gold-producing country. The ‘green’ route seems to have become the accepted orthodoxy as was evidenced n the Bangalore workshop late last year, which produced the Bangalore Open Access Policy for Developing Nations. This makes sense, as it is quick and easy way of providing access to scholarship published in international journals that is otherwise often inaccessible in its country of origin. This means a win-win for the universities that push for publication in accredited journals for the sake of personal and institutional prestige. I have noted that there is also a considerable emphasis among the funding agencies on the need for repositories as the first and best way of providing access to developing country research.

However, the debate between Harnad and Velterop has made me think that, when it comes to the very particular case of Africa, should we not make the growth of open access journals our first priority? In a perverse way, Africa’s potential to leap the technology divide and adopt more radical transformational of scholarly dissemination could be helped by its very low profile in the existing publishing systems. In a world in which the use of ICTs is drastically altering modes of knowledge dissemination, and in which scholarly publishing looks to be thoroughly shaken up, there is a paradoxical advantage in the marginalisation of African scholarly publishing. This is due to the fact that Africa has a very limited investment in the traditional print-based scholarly publication system and this frees policy-makers to engage with new trends in ways that their more privileged counterparts min the North may be constrained from doing.

The recent lobbying efforts of the large journal publishers against open access policy initiatives in the USA, UK and Europe are evidence of the conservative power of entrenched commercial interests. (Richard Poynder analyses the impact of this phenomenon in the EU in an interesting and provocative blog, not to be missed – Open Access: the War in Europe.) The vested interests that are at stake are substantial: for example the EU Communication on its proposed Open Access policy estimates that, of the 2,000 scientific publishing houses globally, nearly 800 are based in Europe, publishing close to 50% of research articles worldwide. These scientific publishers employ 36,000 people in the EU plus 10,000 freelancers. This is a constituency that cannot be ignored by governments in those countries with substantial scientific publishing industries.

In the same way, in northern countries where the majority of scholarly output is channelled through the dominant journal system, there is a backward drag on the transition to open access journals (the ‘gold route’ to open access). In a transitional period it could well be that institutions will land up paying twice, supporting open access publication, yet still having to maintain subscriptions to toll-access journals. As a result, the conventional wisdom in open access circles seems to be that the most reliable way to create access to research knowledge, in the first instance, is to mandate deposit in open access repositories. This is what Stevan Harnad argues.

I would suggest that this is not necessarily the case in Africa, where scholarly publishing is under-developed and, moreover, is clearly marginalised and disadvantaged by the global systems for the ranking of scholarship. South Africa is by far and away the highest-profile African country represented in the ISI system both in terms of the number of South African journals listed in the ISI and the number of articles published in ISI journals. According to the important Report on a Strategic Approach to Scholarly Publishing in South Africa by the Academy of Science of South Africa, commissioned by the Department of Science and Technology and published last year, 57% of South African journal articles published in ISI and locally-accredited journals between 1990 and 2002 appeared in in South African journals and 43% in international journals. Only 15% of the articles published appeared in South-African journals that are also listed in the ISI indexes (ASSAf 2006; 33). In other words, there are very few journals accredited in the international rating system, although a fair percentage of journal articles do get published overseas.

African countries do tend to focus their research publication policies on the need to get exposure in overseas indexed journals, for the sake of raising the international profile of African research. While this is happening, the majority of African print-based journals lead a hand-to-mouth existence, using voluntary editorial labour and with low subscription levels.

In particular, these publications, in common with African scholarly output in general, struggle to reach beyond national borders. As an ex-university press publisher, I am only too aware of the resistance of USA and UK libraries to taking publications from African publishers. This leads me to wonder if the creation of repositories alone is going to be enough to drive greater recognition of African scholarship. The HSRC Press, with its open access monograph publication programme, has demonstrated the importance of aggressive marketing to get local and international attention. In other words, publishing activities are needed.

Print runs for South African print-based journals are low: 54% of South African journals have print runs of below 500 and only around 20% have print runs of over 1,000, according to the ASSAf survey. Even the relatively well-resourced South African journals (at least by African standards) have had little success in achieving satisfactory levels of international subscriptions for their print editions. According to the ASSAf survey, 45% of South-African published journals had fewer than 25 international institutional subscriptions and only 6.2% have more than 200 international subscribers.

Given these leavels of international exposure, there is an obvious advantage in the increased and uninhibited reach of open access electronic delivery and it is interesting to note that there is already a high percentage of journals (about 70%) that already offer electronic access.

In these circumstances, the report argues, it is not surprising that government policy in South Africa appears to favour the growth of South African publications relative to publication in international journals.

The authors of the ASSAf report comment that South African policy-makers would tend to support policies that foster the growth of locally-produced journals and particularly, policies that would grow the percentage of journals that are both South African and on the international indexes.

It is also likely that such policy initiatives in South Africa would support open access publication. The South African government is committed to open systems and has recently adopted an open source software policy for government departments, according to a recent report in Business Day newspaper. The Academy of Science Report endorses open access journal publication (Recommendation no. 6) as the way forward and the Department of Science and Technology appears to endorse this recommendation.

Bearing in mind that South Africa has only 23 journals listed in the ISI indexes(most African countries have none and Kenya and Ethiopia have one each), it becomes clear that the African continent as a whole is hardly at all invested in the global scholarly publishing system. Add to that the fact that journals are not necessarily the best vehicle to disseminate African research effectively for development purposes and it would seem that Africa has real potential to leapfrog technological gaps using the ‘gold’ route – in fact this might be an imperative rather than an option.

When it comes to a choice between the ‘green’ and ‘gold’ routes to open access, one also needs to bear in mind the scale of things one is talking about. If South Africa were to adopt a policy to deposit pre-or post-prints of all journal articles published in foreign journals in the ISI indexes, this would represent, at current publication rates, around 3,500 articles a year – hardly an insurmountable task. So perhaps we could be greedy and go for both the green and gold routes for journal articles.

The State of the Nation 2: Clashing paradigms in South African research publication policy

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When I set out to explore the policy framework for scholarly publishing in South Africa, I did so with a burning question that I have carried over from my publishing career.Given the scenario that I sketched in my last posting, in which African voices are largely silenced by the conventions of global scholarly publication, what I would be looking for would be national policies that would grow the output and effective dissemination of African research in and from Africa, for African development, in the most appropriate media and formats. A publisher’s approach would be to look at the goals articulated in national higher education and research policy and then ask whether policy for research dissemination is encouraging publications that support those goals.

What I found was that there is strange clash of paradigms within the different policy documents and, more starkly, between the policies of different government departments.Before I get too critical of these illogicalities, I need to stress that South African policy is not unusual in this regard. Worldwide,discussion of research dissemination is a blind spot. As the authors of an Australian government report on research communication costs put it:’despite billions of dollars being spent by governments on R&D every year, relatively little policy attention has yet been paid to the dissemination of the results of that research through scientific and scholarly publishing’.

Effective dissemination of higher education research and the availability of that research knowledge to the country that funds it – particularly in Africa – can be quite literally of life and death importance. Just think of the need for rapid responses to the AIDS pandemic, continually informed by the latest research findings. Yet when the question of publication and effective dissemination arises in the policy documents, it tends to be in terms of a generally unchallenged set of presumptions about what constitutes effective research dissemination – articles in accredited scholarly journals and registered patents. And, while universities might spend large sums of money registering patents,there is a tacit assumption that publication is not something that universities pay for. This is, in part, what Joseph J Esposito in a recent article on university presses in LOGOS and the Journal of Electronic Publishing calls ‘ the free rider syndrome. A university must provide for students and faculty and will actively encourage faculty to publish, but a press can be stinted because because it is always possible that a particular book will be published somewhere else.’

The major policy framework for higher education research in South Africa is the research and innovation policy developed by the Department of Science and Technology (DST).Starting with a background report commissioned from the IDRC in 1995, the department consolidated these findings in a White Paper on Science and Technology in 1996 and then updated this in South Africa’s Research and Development Strategy in 2002. To summarise somewhat brutally; the common theme across these policies is that South African research must address national development needs and contribute to employment and economic growth. The emphasis is on the value of collaborative and inter-disciplinary research in a rapidly-changing technological environment. While attention is paid to the need to build the international reputation of South African research, this is balanced out by a developmental focus that insists on a responsiveness to national need

As far as intellectual property is concerned, the Research and Development Strategy articulates the need to address the challenges posed by new technologies, and the question of biotechnology and indigenous knowledge. ‘International thinking on legislation is as fluid and fast-moving as the new technologies themselves’, there port comments. ‘We need to develop competencies as a matter of urgency or face exploitation and marginalisation with respect to our own resources. A clear approach to intellectual property that arises from publicly funded research is required’ (DACST 2002:22). However, the subsequent discussion of IP issues is far from clear,veering between recognition of the importance of public access and ‘appreciation of the value of intellectual property as an instrument of wealth creation in South Africa’ (68). These contradictions are not resolved in the strategy document and indeed legislative reform and policy formation concerning access and copyright have been in suspension in South Africa for some time.

If I were to hypothesise the outcome of these recommendations, as a publisher, I would look for a research dissemination policy that addressed the real needs of a country in a state of radical transformation, that incorporated the potential offered by new methods of knowledge dissemination, and that made provision for arange of publishing outputs to meet the needs of different audiences and constituencies. I would look for a focus on national, rather than international, dissemination in the first instance, to ensure that research findings could have the required impact. I would also look for funding mechanisms to support knowledge dissemination and for policies for public access. Lastly, I would look for an awareness of the potential for new dissemination models based on the advantages offered by new communication technologies to deliver effective research dissemination in the service of radically increased development impact.

This is, however, far from being the case. In a generally enlightened policy environment, publication is the Cinderella that is left abandoned in a dark 20th century kitchen. The White Paper on Science and Technology stresses the importance of developments in ICT. However, read in the context of the whole document, particularly when it comes to discussion of research dissemination, one begins to wonder if the global information revolution being spoken of here is not a matter of information technology minus the information that it is designed to transmit. In other words, the generally technocratic approach of the White Paper does not grapple with the need to communicate and transmit research information in order to achieve maximum impact. It is as if a pipeline is being designed and developed without the provision of the water that will run through it. This carries through into later policy documents so that,startlingly, dissemination and research outputs appear only as a matter of mechanical counts: the number of reports, journal articles and other publications, and patents registered.

It has been left to the Department of Education (DoE), then – at least thus far – to articulate more detailed policy on research publication. The DoE focused on the creation of an overarching policy initiative for higher education reform in South Africa : the formation of the National Commission on Higher Education (NCHE) in1994, which framed the discussion that ultimately led to the White Paper on Higher Education (1997) and the National Plan on Higher Education (NPHE) (2001). The policy-making process was characterised by wide-ranging discussion and debate, with an emphasis on consultation and transparency. Here, again, the framing discourse was developmental and the key issues were equity,diversity, redress and the creation of research strength.

Preliminary remarks in the NPHE on research and research dissemination sound encouraging: a strategic objective is ‘to promote the kinds of research and other knowledge outputs required to meet national development needs and which will enable the country to become competitive in a new global context’ (NPHE:60). The document complained of a lack of coherent policy on research outputs,promising policy development to address this issue. It raised the need to respond to the global transformation of knowledge dissemination through ICTs and talked of the need to build networks to fuel the growth of an innovation culture (NPHE:61). The problems identified are those of declining research publication output and the dominance of ageing white researchers as authors of publications.

When the Department of Education delivered the promised policy on research dissemination in 2003, in its Policy for Measurement of Research Output, it did pay lip service, in its preliminary comments, to the need ‘to sustain current research strengths and to promote research and other outputs required to meet national development needs’. However, the policy document then goes on to spell out a ‘publish or perish’ reward system that recognises and rewards peer reviewed publication in journals appearing in the ISI and IBSS indexes and a somewhat problematic list of locally-indexed journals, in part inherited from the apartheid era.Although peer reviewed books and conference proceedings accepted by an evaluation panel are also rewarded, they appear to have a lesser weighting in terms of financial rewards.

The wording of the policy insists on ‘originality’, rather than tackling the implications of the collaborative research approaches recommended in the research policy framework. The target audience of these publications is identified as ‘other specialists in the field’,therefore rewarding individual rather than collaborative effort and dissemination within the scholarly community rather than the wider dissemination that would be needed to deliver the development goals of the R&D and Innovation policy framework. In other words, the policies framing rewards for research publication remain firmly in a collegial tradition in which the purpose of scholarly communication is turned inwards into the academy. The system is related to personal advancement in academe and the prestige of scholars and institutions in the international rankings rather than grappling with what it might mean to couple this with gearing research dissemination towards broader social goals.

The fact that the DoE rewards the delivery of these publication targets with substantial financial grants means that the drive towards publication outputs in higher educational institutions focuses almost obsessively on the production of journal articles in accredited journals, with international journals carrying higher prestige than local journals. Given the ever-rising cost of commercial journals, over-stretched library budgets and a weak exchange rate, this can mean, particularly for the less well-resourced universities, that a good deal of South African research is not readily accessible to South African scholars, let alone the community at large.

Moreover, the long delay before publication, the outcome of the peer reviewing process and the way the journals are assembled means that journal information is all too often a matter of record – the history of an achievement rather than currently useful information.This is particularly the case in fast-changing technologies, but is no less the case in the human and social sciences, where the information being transmitted could often meet an urgent need, for example in dealing with the social impact of HIV AIDS, environmental crises, or with violence against women and children.

There are signs of hope that this impasse can be overcome. In there cent survey of scholarly publishing conducted by the Academy of Science of South Africa and commissioned by the DST, there is a clear commitment to boosting the quality and impact of local publication and to Open Access. South Africa is a signatory to the OECD Declaration on Access to Knowledge from Publicly Funded Research and this is tagged in the DST policy documentation as an area to bead dressed. I will write more on this in a subsequent posting.