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

Leave a reply

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.

The State of the Nation – South African scholarly publishing and the global knowledge divide

Leave a reply

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.

American publishers hire a “pit bull”

Leave a reply

The most startling news this week, picked up from Peter Suber’s Open Access News and then in Slashdot draws attention to an article by Jim Giles in Nature: PR’s pit bull takes on Open Access. In this article, which is available online (thanks are due to Nature), it emerges that the Association of American publishers and some of their members, including Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society have apparently hired a PR agent to defend them against what they see as a threat to their livelihood from open access publishing. The devil, though, is in the detail – the detail of whom they have hired.

As Jim Giles writes:

The author of Nail ‘Em! Confronting High-Profile Attacks on Celebrities and Businesses is not the kind of figure normally associated with the relatively sedate world of scientific publishing. Besides writing the odd novel, Eric
Dezenhall has made a name for himself helping companies and celebrities protect their reputations, working for example with Jeffrey Skilling, the former Enron chief now serving a 24-year jail term for fraud.

Although Dezenhall declines to comment on Skilling and his other clients, his firm, Dezenhall Resources, was
also reported by Business Week to have used money from oil giant Exxon Mobil to criticize the environmental group Greenpeace. “He’s the pit bull of public relations,” says Kevin McCauley, an editor at the magazine O’Dwyer’s PR Report.

Now, Nature has learned, a group of big scientific publishers has hired the pit bull to take on the free-information movement, which campaigns for scientific results to be made freely available. Some traditional journals, which depend
on subscription charges, say that open-access journals and public databases of scientific papers such as the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) PubMed Central, threaten their livelihoods.

From e-mails passed to Nature, it seems Dezenhall spoke to employees from Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society at a meeting arranged last July by the Association of American Publishers (AAP)….

The consultant advised them to focus on simple messages, such as “Public access equals government censorship”. He hinted that the publishers should attempt to equate traditional publishing models with peer review….

Dezenhall also recommended joining forces with groups that may be ideologically opposed to government-mandated projects such as PubMed Central, including organizations that have angered scientists. One suggestion was the
Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank based in Washington DC, which has used oil-industry money to promote sceptical views on climate change. Dezenhall estimated his fee for the campaign at $300,000%u2013500,000.

In an enthusiastic e-mail sent to colleagues after the meeting, Susan Spilka, Wiley’s director of corporate communications, said Dezenhall explained that publishers had acted too defensively on the free-information issue and worried too much about making precise statements. Dezenhall noted that if the other side is on the defensive, it doesn’t matter if they can discredit your statements, she added: “Media massaging is not the same as intellectual debate.

Officials at the AAP would not comment to Nature on the details of their work with Dezenhall, or the money involved, but acknowledged that they had met him and subsequently contracted his firm to work on the issue.

It is worth reading the Nature article in full. I remain open-mouthed. At least, I suppose, it means that open access is serious enough for the publishers to see it as a threat and that is a good thing. However, for scholarly publishers to be caught out in
such an expedient exercise of truth-bending is another matter – all the more so in the intellectual environment in which they operate. I am particularly surprised at Wiley, which in my dealings with it in the past has emerged as a company with a concern for quality and the ability to think out of the box – to an extent unusual among their peers. So to see them descend to tactics such as this is disappointing. I would have thought that a company like Wiley should have the nerve and the intelligence to
ride the wave, to learn where scholarly publishing is heading and position themselves ahead of the game. I do believe there is a role for good publishers in the Open Access movement and I also believe that Open Access is the way scholarly publishing is going.

Surely, also, these publishers should be paying more attention to their client base. That is where they need good and intelligent PR. The peer reviewers they are using as fodder for their (false) arguments are volunteers from the universities, as are their authors. Their customers, the university libraries, are unhappy with the very high inflation rate of their products, the students in the USA are complaining about the price of textbooks. Should they not be focusing their PR efforts in that direction?

I suppose the bottom-line question, addressed to the academic community that provides these people with their living is the classic one: ‘Would you buy a used car from someone like this?’ Are these to be the guardians of the quality of your scholarship?

No snow or reindeers

Leave a reply

I see that it has been a month since my last blog. Do I have to apologise? Perhaps only to colleagues in the North, as this has been, at least in part, time well spent on a lounger next to the pool, good book in hand, or hanging out in good restaurants (Cape Town does those rather well). Then we have to take care to drink a lot of wine to make space for the new harvest, which is happening around now. The one imperative at this time of year is to keep away from the tourist centres and give beaches a miss on the high holidays.

It perhaps takes a southern hemisphere perspective to realise quite how crazy the commercial Christmas scene is – at least as it is seen from down here near the Antarctic. Go into one of our air-conditioned shopping centres and there will be a giant Christmas
tree, surrounded by snowscapes, elves and reindeers. Outside the temperature is 30 degrees. And then there is a Santa Claus of course, ho-ho-ing and greeting children from under the tree. Strange that – Saint Nicholas was a Turk from the Aegean, with a particular concern for young virgins – no snow or reindeers there. The rotund stomach and white beard came from Nordic folk culture and I gather that the red coat was a contribution from Coca Cola. Quite how that leads to the southern hemisphere pretending that this is a time of ice and snow down under is rather hard to fathom. So I put out my African rococo wire Christmas tree, made by a street trader in Johannesburg many years ago, hang it with beaded baubles and head for the pool with a glass of wine.

We should really switch New Year’s day to the end of June – it is crazy to have to contemplate new year planning in the aftermath of festive season over-indulgence, with the temperature hovering in the upper thirties. Just another example of
global imbalances.

Another good old northern hemisphere tradition has manifested itself this year, at the expense of a number of South Africans. In the olden days, the good people of Devon and Cornwall would light bonfires on the cliffs to mislead ships and lure them onto the rocks. They would then happily relieve the ship, its crew and passengers of any valuables and melt away into the
countryside. So, to have a container ship wreck itself on the Devon coast without any interference was wonderful serendipity. We were then, thanks to modern communications, treated to the sight of a horde of looters smashing open containers washed ashore and staggering off with the property of a number of bemused and angry South Africans – French oak barrels (for this season’s wine harvest), BMW motorcycles, even an aeroplane or two, some claim. Legitimate piracy? Neo-colonial pillage? It at least makes a change for us to be the ones who are pious and superior, tut-tutting about these primitive Brits.

Marketing the HSRC Press – a profile of Karen Bruns

Leave a reply

Last week’s issue of SA Booknews Online ran a profile of Karen Bruns, Marketing Manager of the HSRC Press. The HSRC Press is unusual: it is a successful African Open Access publisher – of books and research reports rather than journals – and it runs a savvy business model, publishing and selling high quality print versions of the publications that it places online free of charge. This profile highlights another, important but often overlooked, aspect of its operations: that it is run by a highly professional publishing team and that its publications are aggressively marketed so as to maximise the impact of the research that is being disseminated.

From the SA Booknews article:

As the Marketing Manager of HSRC Press, Karen Bruns has a fairly good idea of what is needed to achieve success in this line of business. Prior to joining the HSRC in 2002, she held a number of marketing management positions in the publishing and retail industries, developing marketing communications and public relations skills in focused business environments. These include oppositional publishers Ravan Press and David Philip Publishers from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, as well as for Juta & Co, a larger and more commercial company.

What makes HSRC a successful company?

“As far as we know, the HSRC Press is South Africa’s only open access publisher. We think we might be the only open access publisher in Africa but as we haven’t been able to verify that, we really can’t make that claim. We publish both in print and in electronic form. It’s one of the things that make us unique and it’s probably the most exciting part of what it is that we’re doing. It feels very pioneering and at the same time, we’re increasing both the pool of and access to high quality social science research-based publications.”

“Considering where we’re located, I am often asked whether we only publish the research output of the Human Science Research Council (HSRC). While we do manage all of the intellectual property of the HSRC, the answer is no, as we publish many externally authored works – provided they’re furthering the social sciences, which is the mandate of the
organisation in terms of a statutory act.”

How has HSRC Press expanded business structures/opportunities?

Conscious that the HSRC in years gone by produced publications of varying quality, they instituted a formal peer-review process in 2004.

“The editorial board guarantees the highest academic quality and members assist greatly in the review process. We currently publish approximately 45-50 publications per year, that is reports containing primary research, monographs and edited volumes, and the manuscripts keep flooding in.”

“But it wouldn’t do to be pushing out all of these publications without an active local and international marketing programme, in addition to collaborating with foreign publishers on specific titles.”

Development of African intellectual life

The marketing is Karen’s domain, although she says that all of publishing is about marketing, and she cannot lay claim to doing it all.

“Working with authors of high intellect automatically implies that most of my “constituencies” are natural cynics. It’s part of the territory and in my day-to-day dealings with authors, the media, and booksellers; I am constantly reminded that these are not people that can be rah-rahed into excitement about the marketing opportunities in scholarly publishing. For some it is assumed that credibility sells; for others it comes as a complete surprise that academic books should
be marketed at all. Armed with catnip, I constantly work at herding cats and enthusing people about the incredibly exciting opportunities that lie within academic publishing and in the future of this sector that is key to the development of African intellectual life.”

Key to success

“But notwithstanding that we achieve approximately R6.5 million (advertising value equivalent) in free PR on our books alone each year, and that we have international prize-winning titles in our list, and that we have increased representation in the national bookstores, and that we’re establishing some flagship South African products – what most people ask us most often is whether the open access model assists in selling more books!”

“The question is most often accompanied by a cynical eyebrow and a wary expression. I am just as wary to answer, because my answer would have to be that we have seen significant year on year sales increases since our inception in 2002.”

According to Karen, their success can be linked to the improvement of their products, the increase of their sales network, and their growing efficiencies. She is wary of pinning their success to the adoption of the open access model, as she wouldn’t want publishers, librarians, authors, academics, policymakers, or civil society to think for one minute that the adoption thereof was a marketing ploy!

“The reason that we have adopted this model – apart from adoring innovation as we do to a person at the HSRC Press – is that we wanted to assist in opening access to quality social science in Africa – both to Africa and from Africa.”

Comment: Karen strikes a chord for me in this interview when she comments wryly on the fact that that the most common question people ask is whether Open Access online provision sells more books. As she says, that is not the point at all. I cannot imagine that book sales come anywhere near covering the costs of the publishing department. The HSRC provides generous financial support for the HSRC Press, presumably because the organisation finds that this is a good investment. Having
its research effectively and widely disseminated achieves the purpose of the research council, ensuring that its research findings have significant development impact. Moreover, I would imagine that its successfully marketed publications profile the HSRC very effectively in the eyes of the government that funds it and contributes to its ability to attract private research contracts to expand its research activities and supplement its public funding.