Category Archives: Scholarly Publishing

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 – South African scholarly publishing and the global knowledge divide

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Down here in the southern hemisphere, the sun is shining and the south-easter is funnelling down the mountain. The 2007 university summer term has begun and absurdly young students are thronging campus; the President has delivered a carefully-modulated State of the Nation address; and the Finance Minister has spelled out a budget that shows South Africa
significantly in the black. In short, the real working year is only just beginning. So it is perhaps time, in a series of postings, to do
a my own State of the Nation overview of where South Africa stands at the start of 2007 in relation to my area of interest – the
dissemination and publication of African scholarship.

First, a background sketch. I hold an International Policy Fellowship from the Open Society Institute (Budapest) investigating policy for the dissemination of African scholarship. The project aims to map the complex and often contradictory policy environment that frames research publication in South Africa and other African countries. These policies tend to work in two directions: one for the leveraging of research to deliver national development goals – to which the South African government appears to be ready to allocate substantial resources – the other for the recognition and reward of scholarly publication. In particular, the project researches the question of whether countries like South
Africa and its African neighbours can start to turn around the global knowledge divide and raise the reach and visibility of African research using electronic media and the Open Access publishing approaches currently taking hold across the world.

If one looks at the current state of research publication in African countries, what stands out most strongly is the persistent marginalisation of African knowledge – particularly of scholarship about Africa, produced in Africa. Globally, research dissemination takes place within a system that has been in place for around the last 100 years, which has come to be dominated by increasingly
commercialised (and increasingly expensive) journals and by scholarly books produced primarily in the USA and Europe in a globally
unbalanced ‘publish or perish’ scholarly market. For example, to cite but one statistic – in 2000, South Africa, which far exceeds
any other African country in the ISI journal rankings, had just 0,5% of the articles in the combined ISI databases and 0.15% of the most
cited papers (see the SA Academy of Science Report on a Strategic Approach to Research Publishing in South Africa 2006) . Could we really say that this is a fair and accurate evaluation of the global weight and value of the research carried out in this country?

This publication takes place within a generally unquestioned value system in which quality is measured by publication impact in an international arena in which scholars and publishers from Africa are unequal players in the global research economy. For example, the leading international index in which journal publication is valued, the ISI, aims to index the limited range of journal literature that
asserts a disproportionate influence, on the assumption that a relatively small group of journals – or body of knowledge – will account for the most important and influential research in any field. The UK-based International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS), while it prides itself on listing a substantial percentage of journals from outside the UK, nevertheless values them (through an Editorial Board consisting overwhelmingly of UK academics and none at all from developing countries) according to their relevance to UK scholars and libraries. These criteria tend to marginalise research knowledge from the periphery, research that does not address the mainstream interests of scholarship in the US and Europe, and also work to disadvantage disciplines that have particular local relevance rather than more generalised global appeal.

Add to this the physical difficulties and the cost of distributing print materials from the developing world into dominant US and UK markets,
as well as the difficulty of getting these publications accepted by the major libraries, and it becomes clear that the very criteria that the developing world uses for its traditional-model scholarly output are those that contribute also to its marginalisation in the global arena. Even more damaging is the potential for the distortion of research agendas – if scholars are to receive promotion and financial reward for publications that conform to US and UK research agendas, then research topics that might contribute vitally to local development issues risk marginalisation. Moreover, there is a self-fulfilling prophecy, based on the assumption that overseas standards are better, in which local publications, perceived to be of poorer quality, do in fact often come to be of poorer quality, starved as they are of recognition, support and resources.

In tackling these problems, we are seriously handicapped by the fact that in the South African higher education system there is a tacit acceptance that scholarly publication is not the business of the universities – what Joseph J. Esposito in a recent article in LOGOS, calls ‘the
free-rider syndrome. A university… will actively encourage faculty to publish, but a press will be stinted because it is always possible
that a particular book will be published somewhere else.’ Also – and perhaps as a result of the free-rider syndrome, the policies and
practices governing scholarly publication have themselves not been subjected to much research or scrutiny. As a recent Australian government report observed: ‘Despite billions being spent by governments on R&D every year, relatively little policy attention
has yet been paid to the dissemination of that research through scientific and scholarly publishing.’

2007 might well be the year in which South Africa starts to pay more attention to these issues. On the international front, a number of initiatives are putting the issues on the front burner – the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) is in the process of creating an African Science and Innovation Facility; the World Bank has identified higher education as a key driver for African economic growth and poverty eradication; the funding agencies are taking an increasing interest in the potential for unlocking access to African knowledge through the use of ICTs and Open Access; and the steadily growing number of international initiatives for access to publicly funded research (the most recent being the EU meetings held last week). Locally, the Academy of Science of South Africa’s project on scholarly publishing is beginning to take shape, under the aegis of
the Department of Science and Technology (more on that in another posting), an increasing number of Open Access projects are beginning to emerge and the middle economy alliance of Brazil, India, China (and South Africa, tagging on behind) is beginning to impact. But a lot still needs to be done to get these debates a higher profile in the universities and in government.

Ensuring access to your scholarly publications – practical steps for authors

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South African academics are encouraged by national policy for publication reward to publish in accredited journals, with overseas journals considered the most prestigious. Leaving aside for a moment any critique of this policy, how can the successful authors ensure that the knowledge they have generated is not
priced right out of the market for their colleagues and fellow-citizens? This is a real issue, given that the subscription prices of the big commercial journals have risen at about double the rate of inflation in the last decade. Even large and well-endowed universities are struggling to keep up their subscriptions to the
leading journals (let alone all 24,000 journals out there), so it is no surprise that South African universities don’t subscribe to a number of the journals in which their academics publish.

This came home to me when a colleague, Dick Ng’ambi, emailed to his department the other day ‘Maybe Eve Gray has a point. I’ve just received this alert from Springer alerting me on the electronic publication of my article. The cost of accessing this article is US$30 otherwise UCT has to pay(subscribe) to read its own output – are we being short changed?’ The Springer announcement reads: We are very pleased to be the first to congratulate you on the electronic publication of your article “Influence of Individual Learning Styles in Online Interaction: a Case for Dynamic Frequently Asked Questions (DFAQ)” published in “IFIP International Federation for Information Processing”. If your institution has access to this journal, you may view your paper at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-34731-8_14
(you may need to copy and paste the URL into your browser). Well, UCT does not have a subscription, so how do Dick and his colleagues get to read his article, short of paying $30 a view (the price of a thick hardback book in this part of the world, or around 15 hamburgers on the ‘hamburger index’)?

There are in fact some practical things that academic authors can do to ensure that they have maximum access to their own publications. The most important would be to publish for preference in an Open Access journal if there is one in your field.
(And yes, they ARE peer-reviewed and there are high quality publications among the 2,000-odd OA journals, as well as one OA author who has recently won a Nobel Prize.) Next, it is advantageous to secure the right to archive a preprint or postprint of an article on your personal or institutional website. A preprint is the article in the form submitted to the journal, before peer reviewing. A postprint is the article revised according to peer reviewers’ recommendations, but without the journal’s editing and typesetting.) What is clear from research conducted on the impact of archiving, is that the availability of a pre-or postprint increases the downloads of the journal article and can have a significant effect on the citation levels of your work. It also means that yourarticle can be made available to your colleagues, or more generally, depending on the policy of the publisher.

What local authors do not all seem to know is that most journal publishers – some 90% of them – including the major ones, do allow this practice. In Dick’s case, Springer allows for both pre-and postprint archiving.

So how do you handle this if you are submitting or publishing an article? To check the policy of the journal you are thinking of publishing with, go the the Sherpa/Romeo website, where you can search on journals and publishers to establish their policies. The next step is to use one of the toolkits available through the Science Commons Rio Framework on Open Science (blogged in an earlier blog), which includes links to the Copyright Toolbox produced through a joint UK/Netherlands university collaboration. Then negotiate a contract with as much access as you can, using the sample clauses set out in the toolkits, which
by now must be pretty familiar to the journal publishers, seeing that they were created by major university bodies. These include retaining copyright (if you can get away with it) or at least being able to archive your article in some form and being allowed to use your own article in teaching and further research.

The really important thing, though, is that we need to lobby for policies in South Africa for the creation and mandating of research repositories in our universities. This is vital, given the increased access to and impact for our research that this could achieve. But more about that in another blog….

The economic impact of access to research – the Australians count the cost and benefits

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The Department of Education in Australia has recently released a very important report on Research Communication Costs in Australia, in which John Houghton, Colin Steele and Peter Sheehan provide a cost and benefit analysis of existing and emerging alternatives for scholarly communications out of Australian institutions. An article in the Australian, blogged by Peter Suber (who originally drew my attention to this report), provides an incisive summary of the findings, for those who want a rapid overview.

The results of this survey are startling, both for the high (hidden) costs that it reveals universities are paying in the current system and the high level of financial benefits that the report calculates could accrue from more open and effective dissemination of research results.

This is a particularly valuable contribution, because, as the authors note in their opening comments, ‘despite billions of dollars being spent by governments on R&D each year, relatively little policy attention has yet been paid to the dissemination of the results of that research through scientific and scholarly publishing.’

We could learn from this in South Africa. All too often, when problems with the commercial, ‘subscriber pays’ model of journal publication are raised and Open Access is mentioned, the response is an anxious query about where funding would come from to pay for a more open publishing system. What this reveals is a presumption that research dissemination is not the business of universities, but is outsourced to commercial providers. What it also reveals is that the academic community does not realise that it is already paying for scholarly publication, albeit in ways that universities do not conventionally track.

The authors of the Australian report have calculated the cost of the various contributions that are made by higher education institutions to the publication of journal articles. Computing the time involved in the various contributions of authoring, peer review, and editorial activities undertaken by university staff in their quest to get published, they come up with hidden costs of AUD19,000.00 ($14,000.00) per journal article. A scholarly monograph they estimate at AUD155,100.00 ($115,000.00) The authors then go on to quantify the benefits of improved R&D access in Australia, developing formulas for measuring the financial impact of increased dissemination and concluding that there could be very substantial financial returns from a switch to open access scholarly publication. What they conclude is that, In Australia, with public sector R&D at AUD5,912 million and a 25% rate of social return to R&D, a 5% increase in access and efficiency would be worth AUD 150 million a year. It would be very interesting to run these calculations in South Africa, particularly for returns on the R2.5 billion that is spent on university research, given that we really do need the impact that our research can offer,

According to this study, there are also a number of other measurable benefits relating to the increased impact provided by Open Access.

Research costs, they argue, could be impacted by:

  • Speed of access …speeding up the research and discovery process, …and, potentially, reducing the time/cost involved for a given outcome, and increasing the rate of accumulation of the stock of knowledge;
  • Improved access leading to reduced duplicative research… and improving efficiency;
  • Faster access, leading to better informed research, reducing the pursuit of blind alleys, saving R&D expenditure and improving the efficiency of R&D ;
  • Wider access providing enhanced opportunities for multi-disciplinary research, inter-institutional and inter-sectoral collaborations;
  • Wider access enabling researchers to study their context more broadly, potentially leading to increased opportunities for and rates of application/commercialization;
  • Improved access leading to improved education outcomes, enabling a given education spend to produce a higher level of education attainment …..
  • Potential benefits for industry and government could be:
  • The potential for wider access to both accelerate and widen opportunities for adoption and commercialization, thereby increasing returns on public investment in R&D and private investment in commercialization…;
  • The potential for much wider access … for GPs/nurses, teachers/students, small firms in consulting, engineering, architecture, design, electronics, software, biotechnology… who currently have limited or no access, with a possible impact on quality of services and, possibly, productivity in those sector of the economy.
  • The possibility for the emergence of new industries based on the open access content … In turn these might enhance research evaluation and lead to better focused R&D expenditures.

The conclusion of the report is that ‘a move towards more open access may represent a substantial cost-benefit advantage’ . As Peter Suber says in a comment on his blog: ‘Taxpayers need to realize how much the return on their investment in research could be amplified by a transition to OA and how how much they are paying for every delay in that transition.’ It is clear that South Africa would benefit from playing catch-up by getting moving on Open Access policies.

A new journal concept – Plos ONE launches

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Plos ONE, the radical new journal concept (see my16 July blog) has launched. Eric Kansa, , in his Digging Digitally archaeology blog, has this to say:

…PLoS One represents an experiment in a lot of ways. Papers are more clearly part of an ongoing process of communication and discussion and are less like static artifacts. Evaluation and review continue well after initial public dissemination. And in PLoS One, the community is invited to add value to papers through “Web 2.0″ collaborative tools…

Drawing value from user interaction and making users more than consumers of information but inviting them to be participants in creating valuable knowledge sounds like a great approach. It has been widely successful in several high-profile commercial sites, such as Flickr (tagged photos) and Del.ic.ious (tagged web content)….The uptake of these community-participatory (“Web 2.0”) approaches is relatively limited in academic and professional communication (though see Connotea). I doubt this has much to do with technophobia as it much as it has to do with the special social, incentive and professional needs of scholars. If PLoS One can help figure out how to motivate professional communities to use participatory tools that add value to scientific communication, I think they will have made a fundamentally important contribution.

(Thanks to Peter Suber’s Open Access Newsletter for this link)