The Bangalore National Open Access Policy – a way forward for developing countries

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At the end of the Workshop on Electronic Publishing and Open Access in Bangalore two weeks ago, it was agreed that what was needed was not just another declaration, but a document that could be used to drive policy implementation in developing countries. The final version has now been released and is revealed as a remarkably clear and pragmatic document, the National Open Access Policy for Developing Countries.

Where this differs from its predecessors is not only in its focus on the developing world, but the fact that it includes a brief but very clear policy undertaking for signature by national governments, accompanied by a statement of the advantages of Open Access publication to governments and to academics as well as practical
implementation guidelines for effective and easy deposit of articles. The strategy that underpins its approach is that mandating deposit in institutional repositories of journal articles arising out of publicly funded research and making these available for harvesting provides a quick and affordable way of building a national record of
research output.

From the first paragraph, this document reflects something I said in my previous blog – that the mood has changed and that there is now an assertive voice articulating the value of the knowledge that is currently largely marginalised in the global research hierarchy:

The Bangalore workshop was convened to bring together policy makers and research scientists from major developing countries to agree a path forward towards adopting full Open Access to publicly-funded research publications. The importance of access to the world’s research information for the development of a strong economy and a vibrant research capability is widely acknowledged, yet financial barriers limit access by developing countries to the research information they need. Equally, the unique research carried out in countries representing 80% of the world’s population is largely ‘invisible’ to
international science because of economic or other constraints. The resolution of many of the world’s problems, such as emerging infectious diseases, environmental disasters, HIV/AIDS or climate change, cannot be achieved without incorporation of the research from developing countries into the global knowledge pool.

Open Access to the world’s publicly funded research literature provides equal opportunities for the communication of all research information, eliminating financial barriers. Furthermore, articles made available electronically on an open access basis have been shown to be cited on average 50% more often than non-open access articles from the same journal, thus ensuring the greatest possible benefit both to the authors, to the investment of funding agencies and to scientific progress. The benefits to authors, readers and their organisations is now increasingly recognised worldwide and by November 2006, 761 repositories had already been registered in the Registry of Open Access Repositories, and the Open Archives Initiative’s OAIster search engine could search over 9,000,000 records in interoperable Open Access repositories.

The proven advantages of Open Access publishing for developing countries were spelled out in a number of papers at the Bangalore workshop: substantially increased citations leading to higher levels of research impact, the widening of the author base, greater research efficiency through the reduction of duplication and faster dissemination, to name only a few. However, while the SciELO initiative in Latin America demonstrates the considerable benefits of intervention at a national level and of regional collaboration over research publication, systematic policy interventions are still lacking in most developing countries, leading to a fragmentation of
efforts that can, in reality, be ill-afforded. The policy undertaking included in the National Open Access Policy will therefore be a boon to those lobbying for national commitments to access to publicly funded research from governments in developing countries. As Subbiah Arunachalam put it in an email late last week, there is
now work to be done:

The most important thing now is to get policy makers in India, China and many African countries adopt and implement the OA Policy Statement signed by all the participants of the Bangalore workshop. Your suggestions and help are welcome.

The full text of the National OA Policy for developing Countries can be found at http://scigate.ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/OAworkshop2006/pdfs/NationalOAPolicyDCs.pdf

South-South Alliances – the Bangalore workshop on Electronic Publishing and Open Access

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We met for our meals on a shaded terrace under palms and spreading tropical trees in the centre of the enormous campus of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and held our discussions in their senate room, distinguished home to many of India’s leading scientists. Coming from India, China, Brazil and Africa, the UK and US, we were the guests of the Indian Academy of Science, the IISC and the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation and had met to discuss South-South relationships in the development of Open Access research dissemination.

The workshop was an important further step in a growing movement of South-South alliances. What emerged most strongly at the Africa-centred conference in Leiden a few months ago was the question, ‘Whose knowledge, for what purpose for whom?’ The issue there was the tendency for development rhetoric to focus on the
supply of knowledge to the developing world rather than the production of knowledge in and from the African continent. This time, in India, the assertion of the rights of developing nations went a step further. Right at the beginning of the workshop, in one of the introductory addresses, Prof N Balakrishnan, the Associate Director
of the Indian Institute of Science, said, ‘What we need to do is change the “developing country” rhetoric to a world
perspective.’ Put another way – when I emailed Gordon Graham, of the LOGOS journal, one of the wisest people I know from the publishing industry, he wrote back, ‘Do tell me more about the workshop. What a combination. India, China, Brazil and Africa constitute about two thirds of humanity.’ They are both right – what this workshop reminded us is that we in the developing world are the norm – with all our challenges – not the privileged and
powerful who call the shots in scholarly publishing. Alma Swan raised the same issue in another way, echoing something that was said in Leiden: that we have a problem with the common expression of the international/local dichotomy. Why should developing country issues be considered ‘local’ when these apply to the greater proportion of the global population, while , for example, we bow down to the ‘international’ status of the comparatively narrowly-focused ISI indexed journals?

Lawrence Liang, of the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore, gave us the message in another way. In a typically virtuoso and mind-stretching keynote address, in which he charted different meanings of ownership, in different languages and cultures. He invited us to resist a property discourse that conflates property rights with academic rights and turns the collegiality of academe into the hierarchy of property. In that world, he said, those who have most freedom are those who own the most IP. Property in the English sense, he said, the conflation of ‘self’ and ‘own’ resting on exclusion, is something not common to other languages. In Indian, apnapen is not a matter of
owning, or property , but of closeness. Ownership in this sense has the obligation of care and the opposite of care is brutality, like the ‘war’ on piracy that is currently being waged – passport control in a borderless world, Liang argued.

Its insistence on the importance of a developing world view has led India to be an early and successful adopter of Open Access. The Indian Academy of Science publishes 11 OA journals and, strikingly from my point of view as a publisher, Prof Chandrasekran, the Secretary of the IAC, said that whenever the IAS works with international partners, it insists that this must be on its own terms, in ways suitable to the situation in the developing world. There is a lesson to be learned here by those struggling African journal editors who hand over their journals to UK publishers in the name of ‘viability’, all too often landing up unable to afford to buy back their own output.

The general tone of the contributions and discussions at the workshop was pragmatic, echoing Subbiah Arunachalam’s plea at the start of the workshop that we move from words to action in developing South-South collaboration. Barbara Kirsop and Alma Swan both gave admirably clear expositions of the advantages of OA for developing countries, speeding up the solution of global problems, avoiding expensive duplication, increasing impact factors and providing grater visibility for national research. With preprint archiving, the impact or journal articles can begin even before the publication date of the article. Muthi Mathan of NIT in Rourkela gave quietly impressive practical advice on how to swing an organisation round to mandating OA archiving.

Medknow, the Indian OA medical publisher goes from strength to strength, now publishing 40 journals all of them Open Access, none of them dependent on author fees, said DK Sahu, the MD of the company. He took us through an impressive account of the increased impact factors, the wider range of author submissions, the expanding global readership and the resultant improvements in quality, that come from making developing world journals OA. In this way, he argued, small local journals are being turned into international journals. Moreover this has come, in Medknow, without loss of print subscriptions, which remain the main revenue source for OA journals.

In Latin America, SciELO , too, came early to Open Access. Abel Packer stressed the ways in which this collaborative effort across Latin America and the Caribbean is moving journals from the status of local and regional towards the international flow of scientific information. It creaties scalability by publishing collections rather than individual journals and takes care to maximise the exposure of all articles through search engines and databases. SciELO, said Packer, is among the ten most clicked searches in Google Scholar. There are 360 journals currently certified by SciELO and another 64 that should be added soon. The success of SciELO depends on its
independence – the main institution in each country is the science council, so that is is not directly involved with any university or individual journal. The cost efficiencies from the $1 million invested every year are also impressive at about $100 per article per year and 3.7 cents per download for the 27 million articles that are
downloaded every year.

In an interesting insight into the ways in which Chinese scholarly publishing is working, Prof Zu Guang, the Head of the Department of Publication at the Natural Science Foundation Council revealed that most journals were government supported, something that influences the journals’ ability to choose its publication mode. There are 143 OA journals with the NSFC publishing four broad-based journals in Chinese and English and supporting and funding another 30. Most Chinese journals, he said, were not covered by any database and there is a small market at the moment for Chinese scientific journals outside of China.

Amit Kapoor of Topaz also stressed the importance of developing countries even in his very high-tech environment. Topaz needs increased international participation, he said, getting other communities and developers involved. It is difficult to deal in change, however, he argued, as there are established communities out there, creating push-back. Developing countries provide greater potential for expanding new ideas. And, he said, rounding things off nicely, they are only about 80% of the world population.

Against this background, African efforts seem fragmented and decentralised. As Susan Veldsman put it, after her account of the work that EIFL is doing in southern Africa, few repositories are actually up and running, most still in the incubation phase. The problems faced are lack of HR capacity, lack of government support, decentralised efforts and the need for strategic and not only operational efforts. My own paper, based on the work I have been doing for my OSI fellowship, looked at the consequences of publish and perish policies in South Africa in a context where government is, in contradiction of its scholarly publishing policy, looking for
development impact from national research spending. Most of all, I have discovered a black hole in the policy documents where discussion of research publication and development impact ought to be. The most promising development is the South African Academy of Science report on scholarly publishing, commissioned by the Department of Science and Technology, that has come up with the proposal that the Academy take on the role of scholarly publishing coordination and quality
control – something that seems in line with SciElO’s success, if we can pull it off. We could learn from the forward-thinking developments that we have heard about from India and Latin America. The African vice-chancellors meet in Cape Town next week to discuss ICTs in higher education. It will be interesting to see where this
leads.

Papers from the Bangalore workshop are online on www.ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/OAworkshop2006/presentations.htm

Offline in India – a reflection on traffic circles

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I set off for India two weeks ago, digital camera clutched firmly in my increasingly hot and sticky hand, determined that this time I would organise myself to blog my experiences as I went along. I was headed for what sounded like a very interesting meeting – a workshop at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore that would bring together Indian, Chinese, Brazilian and African perspectives on digital publishing and Open Access. The workshop was indeed fascinating and highly productive, but more of that a bit later in my next blog.

Given that Bangalore is the ICT hub of India, I was looking forward to good connectivity and had visions of myself, grey head and all, typing away among the young tecchies in the back row of the workshop. What became immediately apparent, however, was that connectivity was absent. Like the state of affairs at the iCommons Summit in Rio, where exactly the same thing happened, we had a crowd of high-tech people gathered together in a high-tech place and the wireless connection was down. People who know better than me were muttering dark and incomprehensible things about proxy servers. Some conniving anti-Open Access demon must be out there somewhere, watching us, wanting to teach us well-learned lessons about knowing our place in the developing world.

So there were anxious huddles of email-junkies crouching over laptops between sessions, withdrawal symptoms setting in rapidly. Various hugely qualified people from remote corners of the world and the technicians from the Institute fiddled with my laptop, so that just before we left Bangalore, I could connect to the very good wireless system, by then up and running. After that, nothing – my poor neurotic laptop tried frantically to connect to a network that it could not find and then just lay down and wept. Only in Dubai airport on the way back could it download from a super-slick connection.

Resorting to Internet cafés and friends’ computers, I then encountered Mweb at its dysfunctional worst – or so I thought, perhaps unfairly. Try sitting in front of a computer in Mysore, after days off line, staring at a screen that has ACCESS DENIED!! repeated across the screen in random patterns. At least Google mail worked, so I could scream abuse at Mweb. I gather that I was perhaps being unfair, although it did me good to let off steam. The problem was quite possibly just that South-South Internet connections don’t route very well, I am told, while Gmail is on a US server at the hub of the e-world. Does that means that I will have to learn my place in the scheme of things and tone down my idealism about the potential of ICTs in the developing world? I hope not.

Now that I am back home, and after much wise head-shaking by the quietly competent son (every Linux-using mother needs one or two), the laptop is now happy and connected again, but its owner is prostrate, coughing the exhaust fumes of Bangalore out of her lungs.

India was worth it though, even if I was off line, so here are some brief impressions. Most of all, the traffic! Chaos! Driving from the airport in Bangalore and then everywhere else I went, there is a hooting cacophony of mopeds, rickshaws, buses, lorries and cars, weaving in and out in apparent disregard for traffic lanes and unnecessary interferences like solid white lines. And then in the middle of it all, a plodding oxcart or a handcart loaded high. The weaving. I realised, is done with great precision and a complicated understanding of patterns and space. You have to learn very quickly, even on a quiet campus, to respond to a hoot behind you, stepping aside just enough to let a bicycle or moped past without getting in the way of another one. We are pretty clumsy by comparison with Indians, and grossly unaware of our own body space – aggressive, linear space-guzzlers, I realised. .

At first boggle-eyed and confused by the chaos, I then began to realise that we are very Calvinist in South Africa, obeying the rules smugly -up to a point – neat and tidy (yes, comparatively, even our much maligned taxi drivers) but really aggressively asserting our individual right to our own space, at the risk of killing each other in the name of that right. Indian traffic seems to be a place for negotiation and is a great leveller – that sleek BMW in a Bangalore traffic jam is completely disabled as a status symbol, reduced to lesser competence than the ancient but pristine Ambassador taxi or the family on a moped weaving around it. No-one can go too fast – there is not room. But there is that heart-stopping moment as a maze of traffic converges at a complex intersection. Instead of an almighty pile-up, there is an exchange of glances, a swarm of mopeds and cars stops briefly to give way and the complex pattern sorts itself out. How it is negotiated, I don’t know, but it seems to work. And even when we
met a bullock cart plodding the wrong way down the fast lane of a highway in the countryside, road rage did not manifest itself, just a blast on the hooter, a weave, and we were past it.

There were quiet spaces, too, like the avenues of the Indian Institute of Science, walkways shaded by great arching trees, where the crows swooped overhead ,cawing, in the evening. A lone man pushing a handcart down a suburban Bangalore street calling ‘papaya! papaya!’ Or the beach in Goa at sunset, all sifted light, soft pastels and the warm water of the Arabian sea. There were the quiet and cool colonial lounges at the Green Hotel in Mysore, where yoga aficionados gather, egrets sailing over the Cauvery river in the still morning of a bird sanctuary, a young girl tugging at a reluctant cow at the roadside, or a group of men cross-legged on a verandah wall, talking. In the middle of a rice field, a group of men appear to be having a quiet conversation with their cattle. A cluster of young girls, bright as birds of paradise, crowded around me in the gardens of Tipu Sultan’s summer palace in Sringinapatana, wanting to know. ‘What is your name? What does it mean? Where do you come from? You are beautiful.’ Or a anther crowd of small boys, more precise, “What other places are there in Africa? How much does it cost to get here? How much do you spend in India? What does your name mean?’ And the man in the temple who wanted to know if I had found peace.

And the food – eating curry for breakfast turns out to be very good for you. Delicious, mostly vegetarian food wherever I went, and some crab and prawns in Goa (where my Fellowship colleague, Prashant, complained that even the vegetarian food tastes of fish). In a crowded self-service lunch bar in Bangalore, the food was amazing and cost, by our standards, almost nothing – as do the brilliant cottons and silks.

I’ll have to go back- we need to work on these South-South alliances.

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….

Liberating content – with $100 million to spend

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What content would you like to see liberated? This invitation has come from Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, who asks for suggestions of what content should be freed from copyright – with a proposed $100 million budget.

I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be purchased and freed.

Dream big. Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license?

Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific, be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.

I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what we dream of, that we can’t accomplish on our own, or that we would I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be purchased and freed.

This is a tantalising thought for us information-starved people out here on the margins of the world. What would a South African shopping list look like? It is not as if we don’t have a lot of stuff that would be fascinating not only to us but to the world at large. I suspect, for example, that in our recent history, there are documents and archives in our liberatiion history that should be in the public domain and accessible to all. Or are there heritage collections that are currently locked up? Art or music archives? Can we draw up a wish-list?

Tracked from the Boing-Boing blog