The state of the nation 2011 – government policy and open access in South Africa

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The working year is just waking up in summer South Africa and I am to moderate the opening session on the topic of ‘A national perspective on A2K in South Africa’ at the Yale A2K Global Academy. This takes place at the UCT Graduate School of Business on 18 and 19 January and the session that I am moderating needs me to step back and and try to get a perspective on what this national perspective actually looks like.

When it comes to government policy and legislation, the trouble is that South Africa, as usual, does not present a coherent or unified picture, but rather embodies a number of contradictions. Perhaps I could borrow a wonderfully vivid description of the situation in the Caribbean in an Intellectual Property Watch article by Abiole Inniss on Fair Usage in the Caribbean, something that could well apply to South Africa:

A panoramic view of the IP situation in the Caribbean would present to the observer a carnival of Olympic size replete with politicians, diplomats, rights advocates, consumer groups, law enforcement, and impotent jurists, all gyrating discordantly to the WIPO band while Caribbean citizens look on, or are pulled or shoved in.

2010 has been dominated, from my perspective, by a negative force, the pending implementation, during 2011, of the IPR Act for Publicly Funded Research of 2008. While I would argue that the default position these days on publicly funded research is that it should, as far as possible, be publicly and freely available, this piece of legislation, a kind of Bayh-Dole Act on steroids, appears to regard the default as IP protection, with commercialisation through patenting as the most desired outcome. This legislation and its implementing Regulations do appear to recognise the need for research contributions that lead to social and non-commercial development. However, the default position of the implementation clauses in the Regulations is that permission has to be obtained from a national agency before any research that is capable of commercialisation and patenting can adopt open innovation or open source approaches. Continue reading →

Biomed Central and Open Access Africa

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Open Access Africa convened by Biomed Central, with Computer Aid International, and held at Kenyatta University in Nairobi on 10-11 November 2010, challenged me to revise my generally negative perceptions of large international journal publishing companies.Open Access is different, in other words.

My engagement with Biomed Central prior to this Conference involved questions put to us by colleagues in the biological and medical sciences at the University of Cape Town some time ago: how developing country authors can afford the article processing fees that are often charged by commercial open access journals (South Africa being too rich to qualify for a waiver). The researchers concerned were attracted by the ethos of open access and the prospect of much wider exposure, particularly in Africa – an important issue for them – and even better impact factors in these mainstream commercial, but open, journals.

While supportive of open access, these researchers asked why a university like UCT should pay high fees for open access publication, particularly at a time when it still has to commit itself to maintaining its subscription to the bulk of the mainstream international journals? To ask hard-headed questions, what would the costs be, and how would these be offset by the benefits? And who would pay? Is this a library responsibility, like a subscription, or part of the research process?

Biomed in its own blog on the conference poses its arguments for open access in Africa, including the need to address the abnormally low volume of research findings from sub-Saharan Africa and the surprisingly low representation of African open access journals worldwide, in spite of the advantages that they offer to developing countries. The conference, however, provided a wider view that. I am pleased to say, defused much of my doubts.

What I got from the outset of the conference was an immediate realization that there are important differences between the ethos of open access and subscription big commercial journal companies. The picture that emerged from Matt Cockerill’s introduction to the company was that of a publisher that did care about development issues, was conscious of the divides of privilege built into the traditional journal publishing system and was prepared to try to address them. Open Access, Matt Cockerill argued, provides a global partnership for development. Moreover, the health issues that are of vital importance to the developing world and that Biomed supports in its journal publishing are at last getting global support and funding.

Some important differences between open and closed access journals, from our African perspective, as demonstrated by Biomed in various presentations at this conference:

Copyright

Authors publishing in Biomed journals do not only get to keep their copyright, but the articles are published under a Creative Commons Share-Alike licence. This means that the author can re-version the information in the article for audiences other than fellow-scholars. The latter is very important: it emerged strongly from this conference and at the UNESCO workshop that I attended a week later, that many African researchers are concerned to get the maximum development impact out of their research and value the ability to ‘translate’ research results. This means that they are conscious of the need to write popularizations, policy papers, guidelines for health and agricultural workers, and provide local language translations, among others .My presentation, on the strategic benefits of open access for African universities, stressed the need to address the developmental goals of research in Africa, producing publications that addressed these needs, rather than focusing on journal articles alone.This was well received by the African conference participants and led to some discussion of the need for alternative research impact metrics.

Accessibility and the public good

There does not seem to be the exclusive emphasis on ‘mainstream’ or ‘international’ research that characterizes many of the large subscription journals. Accessibility is an important issue for journals in the Biomed stable, its publishers argue, and not only prestige (although its journals are performing very well in the rankings and the number of journals in the ISI rankings are growing annually). The commitment of a journal like the Malaria Journal, articulated by its Editor, Bob Snow, to medical research for the public good is a case in point and it is worth noting that this is by no means incompatible with a high-performance impact factor. This kind of publishing is more sympathetic to African authors and their concerns, while still offering the competitive advantage of a large international journal.

Open peer review experimentation

Experimentation in open review processes in some Biomed journals appears to show a commitment to more democratic systems of research evaluation – again something that resonated with the audience. These experiments include more transparent peer review processes with review reports published alongside the journal article and more experimental approaches with rapid publication accompanied by post-publication comments.

Open data and other media

An interest in the publication of supporting data as well as multimedia materials offers advantages for research sharing – important to Africa with its scarcity of resources.

A developing world focus

The focus of a number of journals and journal articles on developing world issues and its website on Open Access and the Developing World demonstrate a commitment to developing world issues and an engagement with the community of people involved. Biomed is interested in picking up what they see as expanding markets in Africa.

All this suggests that universities like UCT need to address the question of their support for open access publishing as a university-wide strategy for the preferment of open access, policies, funding and support. And in the longer run, perhaps we will be asking questions about the relationship between the local and the global in a more democratic digital world. Will there be a divide, or a continuum?

World Cup Trade Marks rule – but what about trade?

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As the World Cup opening date looms and the fever mounts, South Africans are being subjected to heavy propaganda to jolly them into becoming patriotic supporters of the event, demonstrating their pride in the nation. Mostly this seems to be interpreted as buying something – a t shirt, sweatshirt, cap, scarf, flag…. This would be good for South African trade I would have thought, and for an embattled local textile industry, but a short excursion last week into World Cup land suggested that it is only good for trade marks.

I had decided that I did not want to enter into the hype by jumping up and down in a yellow shirt and blowing a horn. My unwillingness did not have to do with any lack of support for soccer, but rather with the way in which FIFA appears to have hijacked our country, forcing us into its own very commercialized and Eurocentric version of what a soccer World Cup should be, rather than the very much livelier and more democratic event that a truly South African soccer cup would have been. And so I decided that I would instead appoint a surrogate supporter, in the form of a soccer-mad seven-year-old in Khayelistsha and buy him some of the gear so that he could be an enthusiastic supporter.

Thus I found myself shopping for a child-sized yellow Bafana soccer shirt in a very big shopping complex in a suburban centre one weekday afternoon. Trailing from shop to shop, I rapidly realised that I was accompanied by a throng of other potential customers all engaged in the same exercise. South African shops are pretty good and you can normally find what you want. However, here we all were, all shapes, sizes, ages, income levels, potential customers every one of us, all vainly seeking the holy grail of a world cup t-shirt for some soccer-crazy child. A wonderfully large captive market, I would have thought, a really good revenue-earner, a boost for local trade.

It soon became apparent what the problem was – Trade Marks. Only goods branded with the ‘official FIFA product’ status could be sold. But why were they not everywhere, so that all these shoppers could buy them? Because they are too expensive. And boring. But surely Trade Marks are supposed to promote and not inhibit trade? And in any event, the fashion trade seems to operate better without this IP apparatus, as Johanna Blakely made so gloriously evident in her recent TED talk about how well fashion does without the apparatus of IP protection. Continue reading →

Excellence or quality – metrics and values in scholarly communications

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In June 2009, in the process of scoping a project to research ways of building capacity in African scholarly publishing, a workshop was held with a group of experts from a variety of perspectives and a variety of approaches to the question of scholarly communications. Supported by the IDRC and the Shuttleworth Foundation, this workshop turned out a very lively event and – we believe – provided seminal insights into the questions that need to be addressed in order to build African research communications capacity.
This workshop has now been captured on a website that hosts videos of the keynote speeches (ten minute presentations, so they work well this way). It also contains commentary on the speeches and discussions as well as the key findings that emerged from this discussion. The website was funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation and provides a discussion form for these ideas to be carried forward. One lesson learned, perhaps, was the value of discussion in a a small and focused group of experts from a variety of contexts and a variety of specialisations.
In yesterday’s blog I took to task the Thomson Reuters analysis of African research developments, arguing that, by focusing only on the production of journal articles and on citations in an international journal index, they were taking too narrow a view of what constituted research development. So here, from the Scholarly Communications, is the keynote address by Jean-Claude Guédon, of the University of Montreal, who gave the opening address of the workshop.

Jean-Claude Guédon – Scholarly Communication in Africa: Project Scoping Workshop from Creative R&D on Vimeo.

Guédon starts by introducing vocabulary issues that need to be clarified on order to understand the research communications environment. In particular, the difficulty in discerning the difference between ‘quality’ and ‘excellence.’ According to Jean-Claude, quality is a matter of the minimum thresholds that are needed for functionality, a matter of what skills or levels of professionalism are needed to deliver a particular function. The concept of excellence, on the other hand, is a matter of competition, with specifically defined parameters creating the rules of the game in which this competition is played out.
He continues to the topic of scholarly publishing, which has artificially constructed competition as its basis, so that it has become all about creating excellence. Jean-Claude’s advice is to disengage from this situation, by reviewing the notion of what constitutes excellence. He also says we need to look at the whole value chain of scientific communications, as well as the data that underpins research and ensure that it is preserved and made available. He also speaks about the benefits of a collaborative knowledge environment, as well as the need to reposition knowledge and society.
The message is that we need to unpack the language of excellence and competitiveness before we subscribe too blindly to the race that that involves. Developing countries cannot ignore this side of scholarly performance and it is important that they prove their ability to achieve the accepted standards of performance in what has become, for better or for worse, a dominant measure. However, this should not be expanded to be the only, or the dominant measure of performance. Rather, there should be a balanced approach, with great emphasis placed on the need to build capacity by developing the quality standards that could ensure truly professional performance.

‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.’ Thomson Reuters’ myopic vision of African research capacity

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T S Eliot’s damning metaphor for the narrowness of social conventions came to mind when I read Thomson Reuters’ Global Research Report Africa, ostensibly a report on the state of African research, but in fact a very limited analysis based solely on the performance of African countries in the Thomson Reuters ISI journal indexes. I was alerted to this report by University World News, which has now published two totally uncritical articles on Thomson Reuters’ ‘global’ analysis of African research.
This is insidious stuff. The Global Research Report Africa is indeed measuring out the lives of African researchers in coffee spoons, basing itself on an unproblematized assumption that the number of journal articles published and citation analysis of these articles can be an adequate measure (let alone the only measure) of the state of national research systems in Africa. It uses scientific-sounding language to equate these ‘outputs’ – ISI-listed journal articles – with research capacity and then in turn equate this measure with the potential for improved global economic performance for African countries.
The intent of this this report is pretty clear. The report starts off with an explicit statement: it is designed ‘to inform policymakers and others about the landscape and dynamics of the global research base’. Although its concluding remarks have a modest disclaimer, that ‘it would be inappropriate to suggest that the preliminary analysis in this report can provide a clear direction’, nevertheless the intent is again made clear – to ‘help provide a further context to that set by the OECD’s economic reports, while also furnishing background against which to view the pertinent regional dispatches in the UNESCO Science report 2010…’ We should not forget either that the criteria and analysis for the Times Higher Education university rankings are now to be managed by Thomson Reuters. Is the company positioning itself even more strongly as the sole arbiter of scholarly excellence and the sole source of data for the measurement of research development? Continue reading →