Category Archives: Research

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.

Our new project – OpeningScholarship – launches at UCT

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We have just posted the first blog for our new project. Funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation it will run for the next year in the Centre for Educational Technology at the University of Cape Town. The OpeningScholarship
project, with myself as the Strategic Project Director and Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams as Research Manager, will explore the transformative potential of information and communication technologies in the context of the University of Cape Town, selected for this project as one of South Africa’s leading research universities.

Through a series of case studies at UCT, the project will explore the ways in which new and interactive information and communication technologies are impacting on communication patterns between researchers, lecturers and students and between the university and the community. The project aims to identify ways in which
these new technologies can expand research and learning in the institution beyond the narrow walls of the curriculum to engage the university community with important cross-cutting issues and the convergence of traditional disciplines.

Some of the research questions that we will be asking are:

  • How can an institution such as UCT best build collaboration for scholarly communications across the institution?
  • What could an ICT system such as that at UCT offer in terms of new and opened up communications in teaching, learning and research?
  • How can the ICT systems that are in place help deliver much greater intellectual capacity, allowing the university (and by extension, the country) to rely on its own intellectual capital rather than on imported content?
  • What lessons can be learned from those departments making effective use of ICTs and new approaches to research dissemination?
  • How can existing projects – both departmental initiatives and donor-funded projects – be coordinated to achieve an effective and collaborative institution-wide scholarly communication system?
  • What policies and practices would need to be encouraged if the university is to achieve the maximum impact for its scholarly communications for research, teaching and learning, and outreach?

The intervention will aim to explore the potential of the full range of formal and informal communication strategies available to UCT in the 21st century, from formal scholarly publications to repositories, blogs, wikis, mobile technology, podcasts and video streaming.

We look forward to lively discussion in this blog, in wikis, meetings, workshops and seminars, about the changing dynamics being brought about at UCT through the use of ICTs for communications between researchers, between lecturers and students, and between the university and the communities it serves. It is going to be a lively year!

Patents and open science – and that Bill again!

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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

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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.