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.

An African citation index? The AFC-Codesria conference on digital publishing

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Around 65 delegates met in a mild and sunny Leiden in early September, as guests of the African Studies Centre of the University of Leiden, to
discuss the the North-South divide and scholarly communication in Africa in the digital era. This was a follow-up to an initial conference on the topic in Dakar two years ago. The differences between the two conferences were telling: while the 2004 event consisted largely of informative and explanatory papers, laying the ground for an understanding of the terrain, this time there was a much more confident interrogation of the assumptions that underlie international scholarly communications systems and the power relations at play in the scholarly community. The papers were of a very high standard and the conference teased out many key issues facing African scholarly publishing, bringing delegates up short against of the major challenges that face the continent, yet not descending into the abyss of Afro-pessimism that so often characterises meetings of this kind.

Appropriately, given the venue, collaboration and partnership were very much on the agenda. As Adebayo Olukoshi said in his opening speech, global knowledge dissemination is characterised by asymmetries from previous systems of knowledge production. The conference was designed to
address these asymmetries, he said, with the aim of developing strategies for using CODESRIA’s CODICE documentation centre to help
leapfrog institutional practice across the continent. In this context, CODICE is seen as a pioneer centre on the African continent
for the development of digital media and online resources in the social sciences. The main lines of discussions that emerged at the conference were cogently summarised in this opening speech – the inequalities inherent in the scholarly system and the marginalisation of African knowledge in that system; the problematic yet ultimately liberatory role of technology; the need for leapfrogging disadvantage; and the vital importance of collaboration and resource sharing.

Open Access publication seemed to have ready acceptance across the board as the most enabling dissemination model for African scholarship, offering greater citation impact, greater efficiency and, most important, more democratic access to knowledge. Given that a number of speakers identified distribution problems as the major barrier to research dissemination, the potential for Open Access digital distribution was doubly attractive, leading to an increase in impact factor of between 56% and 227%, according to Marlon Domingues of the ASC.

The conference agreed that Codesria should propose the creation of an African citation index as a way of addressing the inequalitites that characterise the marginalisation of African publication. The particular occasion for this event was the launch of Connecting Africa, an ASC initiative to harvest African Studies data by building links to repositories across the world. As an example of North-South collaboration, this initiative builds on existing resources to leverage access to a body of African Studies content, fostering partnerships between institutions in the North and in Africa. The resultant collaboration aims to redress the knowledge divide by balancing access to research content produced in Africa and that
generated in the global North.

Providing a perspective from the global South, Subbiah Arunachalam gave an eye-opening account of the ways in which Open Access knowledge dissemination to rural knowledge centres in India had contributed to poverty reduction and the delivery of development goals – as well as saving the lives of coastal fishermen through the provision of weather and tidal information. These networks translate knowledge from the research environment to local communities – ‘lab-to-land’ as Arun described it – using digital, print, and broadcast media to get the message across in projects in some 40,000 villages. Although researchers in developing countries face severe disadvantages, it was clear that technology could help
bridge the gap between rich and poor. Given the challenges that face us, such as SARS, avian flu, and tsunamis, he argued, the improvement of ICT access and the building of research networks must be seen not as a luxury but a necessity.

A number of speakers, however, asked the question ‘Open Access to what, for whom?’ In a closely argued paper, Paul Wouters of the Virtual Studio in the Royal Netherlands Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, challenged delegates to interrogate many of the assumptions behind Open Access, including its seemingly uncontroversial value as a public good. OA also has a history, he argued, based mainly in the library and information sciences and is based on assumptions about the scientific systems, knowledge produced in the systems, and practices in the system. Scientific knowledge is closely connected to local circumstances, he argued, not valid universally. Universality is the result of a lot of work, not only in dissemination but in an active act of translation. There are, moreover, under-recognised difficulties in sharing data, he argued including emotional differences between, for example, physicists working with less personal data and social scientists. The question therefore is how to
turn the humanities and social sciences to more collaborative methods.

This tension between ‘international’ and ‘local’ knowledge was interrogated by a number of speakers, along with the implicit hierarchies that underlie such a concept. Arguing that many development consultants do not understand the knowledge of their subjects very well, development consultant Mike Powell pleaded for an understanding of the multiplicity of knowledges in the environment and for applied research in navigating this diversity. He challenged the easy assumption that African knowledge is ‘indigenous knowledge’ and US and European scholarship ‘global knowledge’. African scholars were encouraged to resist the devaluation of African knowledge – for example, depending on circumstances, Mike argued, a doctor trained in Maputo could be more valuable than one with a more prestigious Harvard qualification.

Williams Nwagwu of the University of Ibadan tackled the local/international issue from another perspective, making the case for the creation of an African citation index, arguing that African research is for the most part, ‘unavailable and inaccessible’ as a result of the selection criteria imposed by the mainstream Northern citation indexes. These exclude most research done in Africa and, in particular, deny the importance of locally or nationally-focused research, which tends to be applied research, understandably enough, given African circumstances. Peter Lor, a former National Librarian in South Africa and a keynote speaker, concurred, arguing that the South African system places excessive emphasis on the USA ISI citation index and disadvantages local journal output as a result.

Marlon Domingues cited the “;Matthew effect” in citation – “for every one that hath, to them shall it be given”’. The South American example of the SCIELO database was cited by a number of speakers as a valuable coordinated cross-national policy initiative that has substantially increased the exposure of research from the participating countries – and if Cuba can do it, so can African countries.

The proposal for an African Citation Index was taken up enthusiastically by the delegates and a proposal was accepted for Williams to prepare a model for CODESRIA, for the idea to be taken up with the AAU and NEPAD. Terms of Reference should be ready by October-November 2006.
There was broad agreement on the ways out of the impasse faced by African research dissemination. Common themes were the need for the recognition of grey literature, – the inclusion of content (as is the case in SCIELO) that is not peer reviewed, as a means of evaluating social impact. Garry Rosenberg provided a clearly articulated account of the case study of the HSRC Press, arguing that Africa’s future cannot be found in the glbal North’s past, but that Africa needs new publishing models that honour the social purpose of publishing. It is an ethical responsibility to make research findings available, he argued. it was possible to buck global trends, he said – for example, 22% of the citations from the President’s
office were from HSRC publications.

Interventions suggested were : training in info-literacy and information management; education in copyright (from the perspective of educational institutions rather than that of publishers); the creation of much greater awareness of scholarly communication issues; the building of collaborative networks; the fostering of a new role for African libraries; and the creation of Africa’s own electronic publication and dissemination tools, policies and practices.

In the final keynote address, Olivier Sagna, from Cheik Anta Diop University in Dakar, but recently appointed to a strategic position in CODICE at CODESRIA, pulled together a number of these themes. Africa had been outside most developments he said, but now research knowledge had to come from out of Africa. The continent was disadvantaged by global institutions like the WTO and WIPO; libraries had non-existent budgets, there was a digital divide and a scientific divide. Most of all, he said, there was a lack of public policies and no civil society movement for higher education. What was happening in Africa, he said, was the growth of FOSS, the localisation debate, the establishment of repositories and research archives, Creative Commons SA, with Nigeria to follow, NRENs. What needed to be done was awareness-raising; policy creation (Open Access, FOSS, etc.); training programmes in electronic dissemination; customised and innovative information products and services; information management leading to knowledge management and from STM dissemination to knowledge and communication strategies. The challenge, then, would be to move from national to regional programmes. Most important, African universities needed to create communication links and collaborative networks so that efforts are no longer fragmented. Perhaps, he said, in 2007 there should be a Timbuktu Declaration on African Open Access.

iCommons spins off tools for Open Access scholarship – the Rio Framework for Open Science

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The iCommons Summit in Rio (June 2006) continues to spin off results. It is great to see that the promises made by various groups at the Summit – in this case the Science Commons – are delivering on schedule. An invaluable set of resources for Open Access scholarship was launched this week, the Rio Framework for Open Science. The resources are set up on a wiki, moderated by John Willbanks (who will be visiting South Africa in February) and our own Heather Ford, who heads up Creative Commons South Africa and is also Executive Director of iCommons.

The Rio Declaration says this about its purpose:

The goal of this Framework is to provide a seedbed of resources for those interested in Open Science, from the background information to examples of institutional policy, from arguments and evidence to the tools needed to implement various elements of Open Science.

The website collates information and resources that could, as the website puts it, ‘unleash the scientific research cycle’. I must confess I brought proceedings to a grinding halt at the iCommons when I asked “Whadd’ya mean by ‘Science’?” The answer appears to be that the main drive for the Science Commons comes from people with an S&T background (it is housed at MIT), yet the tools it is developing could be of value to scholars in all disciplines.

The main headings under which resources are collected are:

  • Policy – listings and links to the various OA policy declarations and initiatives and articles and case studies on OA, how it works and its impact factors. There are signs that South Africa is beginning to grapple with the question of access to research from public funding and the recent ASSAf Report on scholarly publishing in South Africa is recommending Open Access repositories and journals. So OA policy is on our agenda right now.
  • Law – not only Creative Commons copyright contracts, but invaluable stuff from the Scholar’s Copyright Project, such as the ‘Author’s Addenda’ that can be added to publication contracts to ensure that academics can retain at least enough rights to be able to archive their articles on the Internet.
  • Technology – useful links to OS software tools for research management – for archiving, creating documents, annotating on the web…

There is a lot here – go and take a look and add to the Wiki with our own resources.

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)

Through the looking glass? Scholarly publishing seen from the South-eastern frontier

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I have given a couple of workshop papers on scholarly publishing in the last ten days or so. Sounds dry, doesn’t it? That might apply to one of those ‘How to crack the system and get published in an accredited scholarly journal’ papers that I think my audiences were expecting (and dreading). But if one casts a steely eye over the system that we all take so unquestioningly for granted, then things can get a lot livelier. What would the proverbial woman from Mars make of it? The basis of the academic accreditation system is that our scholars are assessed and promoted primarily according to their ability to get published in journals in other countries, whose systems are patently weighted to exclude them – and to exclude many of the burning issues that might be of national relevance.

Looking at the scholarly publishing system from the perspective of a scholar in the humanities and social sciences in a South African university, one thing is for sure – we really are on the margins of the world. This is not a system conceived of for the benefit of our developing world, but designed to suit the needs of powerful institutional and hard-nosed commercial interests in big first-world economies. If one looks dispassionately at what the universities put into this system and what they get out of it, it is patently dysfunctional. Scholars pay for conducting the research, writing the articles, for acting as peer reviewers, then pay page charges, as often as not, to get published. Then the universities buy back that information, often at vastly inflated prices, from near-monopoly conglomerates, operating a commercial system in which market forces don’t work.

The way we relate to the system has its absurdities. We bind ourselves into trying to publish primarily in journals selected by indexing systems that explicitly marginalise contributions from the peripheries of the world, where we live. Also, as a CSIR researcher pointed out in one of last week’s workshops, the numbers just don’t work: “There are a thousand-odd researchers in the CSIR”, he said, “and we are each required to publish two articles per year in accredited journals. Where are we going to find accredited journals to publish more than two thousand articles from the CSIR alone? And who is going to read them?”

The scholarly publishing system is not working even in the powerful knowledge economies that call the shots. As the leading radical IP lawyer, James Boyle, said at the iCommons Summit in Rio, “We have a scientific publishing system that is massively dysfunctional and really, really broken.” Or, as Lindsay Waters, the Humanities Editor at Harvard University Press put it in one of his papers; “The patient is dying! Call the ambulance.”

So where does that leave us, here in South Africa? And what can we do about it?