Tag Archives: Open Access

The State of the Nation 3: Journal publishing in South Africa – the green or gold route in the country of gold?

Quite a spat has broken out in open Access circles about whether it would be better to take the ‘green route’ to open access mandating open repositories, or more effective to go for the ‘gold route’ of developing open access journals. Stevan Harnad was infuriated by Jan Velterop’s statement that ‘the “cure” of open access publishing is to be preferred to the “palliative” of self-archiving’ and has written an angry reponse. I have followed with interest the preceding, more considered, debate in Velterop’s blog, The Parachute and Harnad’s Open Access Archivangelism, because I am, like Velterop, a publisher by background and appreciate his intelligent ability to balance the need for access and the realities of publishing and because I admire Harnad’s intellect and passion for the cause of Open Access.

The debate made me step back and rethink my approach to green and gold (the colours of our national sports teams, by the way) in this major gold-producing country. The ‘green’ route seems to have become the accepted orthodoxy as was evidenced n the Bangalore workshop late last year, which produced the Bangalore Open Access Policy for Developing Nations. This makes sense, as it is quick and easy way of providing access to scholarship published in international journals that is otherwise often inaccessible in its country of origin. This means a win-win for the universities that push for publication in accredited journals for the sake of personal and institutional prestige. I have noted that there is also a considerable emphasis among the funding agencies on the need for repositories as the first and best way of providing access to developing country research.

However, the debate between Harnad and Velterop has made me think that, when it comes to the very particular case of Africa, should we not make the growth of open access journals our first priority? In a perverse way, Africa’s potential to leap the technology divide and adopt more radical transformational of scholarly dissemination could be helped by its very low profile in the existing publishing systems. In a world in which the use of ICTs is drastically altering modes of knowledge dissemination, and in which scholarly publishing looks to be thoroughly shaken up, there is a paradoxical advantage in the marginalisation of African scholarly publishing. This is due to the fact that Africa has a very limited investment in the traditional print-based scholarly publication system and this frees policy-makers to engage with new trends in ways that their more privileged counterparts min the North may be constrained from doing.

The recent lobbying efforts of the large journal publishers against open access policy initiatives in the USA, UK and Europe are evidence of the conservative power of entrenched commercial interests. (Richard Poynder analyses the impact of this phenomenon in the EU in an interesting and provocative blog, not to be missed – Open Access: the War in Europe.) The vested interests that are at stake are substantial: for example the EU Communication on its proposed Open Access policy estimates that, of the 2,000 scientific publishing houses globally, nearly 800 are based in Europe, publishing close to 50% of research articles worldwide. These scientific publishers employ 36,000 people in the EU plus 10,000 freelancers. This is a constituency that cannot be ignored by governments in those countries with substantial scientific publishing industries.

In the same way, in northern countries where the majority of scholarly output is channelled through the dominant journal system, there is a backward drag on the transition to open access journals (the ‘gold route’ to open access). In a transitional period it could well be that institutions will land up paying twice, supporting open access publication, yet still having to maintain subscriptions to toll-access journals. As a result, the conventional wisdom in open access circles seems to be that the most reliable way to create access to research knowledge, in the first instance, is to mandate deposit in open access repositories. This is what Stevan Harnad argues.

I would suggest that this is not necessarily the case in Africa, where scholarly publishing is under-developed and, moreover, is clearly marginalised and disadvantaged by the global systems for the ranking of scholarship. South Africa is by far and away the highest-profile African country represented in the ISI system both in terms of the number of South African journals listed in the ISI and the number of articles published in ISI journals. According to the important Report on a Strategic Approach to Scholarly Publishing in South Africa by the Academy of Science of South Africa, commissioned by the Department of Science and Technology and published last year, 57% of South African journal articles published in ISI and locally-accredited journals between 1990 and 2002 appeared in in South African journals and 43% in international journals. Only 15% of the articles published appeared in South-African journals that are also listed in the ISI indexes (ASSAf 2006; 33). In other words, there are very few journals accredited in the international rating system, although a fair percentage of journal articles do get published overseas.

African countries do tend to focus their research publication policies on the need to get exposure in overseas indexed journals, for the sake of raising the international profile of African research. While this is happening, the majority of African print-based journals lead a hand-to-mouth existence, using voluntary editorial labour and with low subscription levels.

In particular, these publications, in common with African scholarly output in general, struggle to reach beyond national borders. As an ex-university press publisher, I am only too aware of the resistance of USA and UK libraries to taking publications from African publishers. This leads me to wonder if the creation of repositories alone is going to be enough to drive greater recognition of African scholarship. The HSRC Press, with its open access monograph publication programme, has demonstrated the importance of aggressive marketing to get local and international attention. In other words, publishing activities are needed.

Print runs for South African print-based journals are low: 54% of South African journals have print runs of below 500 and only around 20% have print runs of over 1,000, according to the ASSAf survey. Even the relatively well-resourced South African journals (at least by African standards) have had little success in achieving satisfactory levels of international subscriptions for their print editions. According to the ASSAf survey, 45% of South-African published journals had fewer than 25 international institutional subscriptions and only 6.2% have more than 200 international subscribers.

Given these leavels of international exposure, there is an obvious advantage in the increased and uninhibited reach of open access electronic delivery and it is interesting to note that there is already a high percentage of journals (about 70%) that already offer electronic access.

In these circumstances, the report argues, it is not surprising that government policy in South Africa appears to favour the growth of South African publications relative to publication in international journals.

The authors of the ASSAf report comment that South African policy-makers would tend to support policies that foster the growth of locally-produced journals and particularly, policies that would grow the percentage of journals that are both South African and on the international indexes.

It is also likely that such policy initiatives in South Africa would support open access publication. The South African government is committed to open systems and has recently adopted an open source software policy for government departments, according to a recent report in Business Day newspaper. The Academy of Science Report endorses open access journal publication (Recommendation no. 6) as the way forward and the Department of Science and Technology appears to endorse this recommendation.

Bearing in mind that South Africa has only 23 journals listed in the ISI indexes(most African countries have none and Kenya and Ethiopia have one each), it becomes clear that the African continent as a whole is hardly at all invested in the global scholarly publishing system. Add to that the fact that journals are not necessarily the best vehicle to disseminate African research effectively for development purposes and it would seem that Africa has real potential to leapfrog technological gaps using the ‘gold’ route – in fact this might be an imperative rather than an option.

When it comes to a choice between the ‘green’ and ‘gold’ routes to open access, one also needs to bear in mind the scale of things one is talking about. If South Africa were to adopt a policy to deposit pre-or post-prints of all journal articles published in foreign journals in the ISI indexes, this would represent, at current publication rates, around 3,500 articles a year – hardly an insurmountable task. So perhaps we could be greedy and go for both the green and gold routes for journal articles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

graysouth

Open access – a view from the South

Tag Archives: Open Access

The State of the Nation 3: Journal publishing in South Africa – the green or gold route in the country of gold?

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

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

Offline in India – a reflection on traffic circles