Tag Archives: South Africa

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

1 Reply

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 →

Scholarly publishing as a transformation issue in South Africa

Leave a reply

With the Higher Education Transformation Summit taking place in Cape Town on 22 April, universities have been in a reflective phase, examining their success – or lack of it – in achieving post-apartheid transformation. The report card shows that we are achieving a great deal, but could try harder. There is still a way to go before all our students and academics feel they are in institutions that are really their home.
No-one seems to have noticed the elephant in the room. In all the discussions, I see very little attention being paid to the role that scholarly communication and publication plays in the transformation process. We talk about the demographic profiles of our universities, yet we do not seem to question the communication environment that students and staff are immersed in and the values that are reflected there.
Why is it, for example, that, as the South African Minister of Higher Education and Training , Blade Nzimande, complained at the UNESCO 29th World Conference on Higher Education that ‘there is a gender imbalance throughout higher education systems especially in leadership positions.’ in his keynote address at the Transformation Summit, he picked up on the fact that the average age of academics continues to rise and that there has been a drop in the number of staff under the age of 30? Does the publishing system that is so central in determining who is promoted and rewarded play a role in these demographics? Is this an alien environment for the young scholars that the universities want so badly to attract? Do students and researchers find their own, African, world reflected adequately in the scholarly resources that they have access to? Are the values that our researchers hold reflected in the ways in which they are supported in publishing their research? Continue reading →

IPR Act Regulations – IP under uncertainly in South Africa

Leave a reply

Derek Keats. the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Knowledge management at Wits University has posted a series of blogs in the proposed Regulations for the implementation of the IPR Act. He thinks – and I agree – that they will probably be unworkable and that they will almost certainly act as a hindrance and not a help to research effectiveness in the country.

Some of his comments:

Most importantly, innovation thrives in the absence of impediments. Every time a researcher must go to NIPMO for permission, there is another barrier to innovation. More barriers equates to less innovation. This is a sine quo non, and cannot be changed… These regulations will stiffle innovation, not just in software, but in almost every sphere of research endeavour. They are bad for innovation, they are bad for research, they are bad for business, and they are bad for South Africa. Research innovation is something that is made from a harvest of passion and energy, and the capacity for the unfettered creativity that universities make possible. Anything that reduces that capacity for unfettered creativity, and creates the risk of a passion drought will undermine innovation and lead to less, not more, innovation. This is something that I know with as much certainty as I know I have 10 fingers (currently). Much as software patents favour existing large companies, and make
it difficult for a new company to become large, these regulatins will have a small negative impact on the research superstars, but will make it much more difficult to become a new superstar, and will drive passionate people away from research into other carreers. Academic freedom is important to people, and people do innovation. Trample on it at your peril!If you look at the range of work that these regulations cover, which
is effectively all knowledge work undertaken with public funds, the range of knowledge needed to make non-spurious decisions is enormous. The level of talent that will be needed for the imlementing body,
NIPMO, to work is very high. These are not decisions that can reasonably be expected to be taken by inexperienced people who have just completed a masters degree. They need experienced researchers, with doctorates and many years of research and development experience. Such people simply do not exist in South Africa. They could be taken out of the Universities, but then that would undermine the innovation process they are supposed to be managing. So where will they come from?

Finally, he makes a set of useful suggestions on how things could and should work:

  • Leave critical decisions close to the site of the action,
    where people are most familiar with the challenges and opportunities
    and can act in an agile manner with the minimum of delays;
  • Ensure
    that the services are available to assist with commercialization of
    research, including legal services, product development assistance, and
    that these are available with minimum of fuss whether a proprietary or
    open source business model is followed;
  • Ensure that there
    is a National fund to help startups fight patent challenges from patent
    trolls and other holders of spurious patents, especially large
    multinational corporations with large patent portfolios which may
    contain numerous dubious patents;
  • Recognize that the vast
    majority of researchers are not doing research that will lead to
    commercial products, and do not bring the whole innovation regime in
    South Africa under these regulations, where social and cultural
    innovation will be stiffled; rather provide means to assist and inform
    such researchers to find commercially or socially beneficial uses for
    their research when they tell you they would like your help;
  • Where
    software and documentation in various forms are concerned, accept the
    National Policy on Free and Open Source as also being an important
    guide for action among responsible, knowledgeable researchers.

I hope Wits University’s reposnse to the Regulations will incorporate all o of this.

Research Publication Policy in South Africa

Leave a reply

I have now completed my year as an International Policy Fellow of the Open Society Institute (Budapest) and the Policy Paper resulting from the year’s investigation, Achieving Research Impact for Development: A Critique of Research Dissemination Policy in South Africa , is now available on my IPF website. I hope that this detailed evaluation of South African research policy and the recommendations for policy change will trigger debate among South African academics. Here is the Abstract, which outlines some of the paper’s findings:


This paper reviews the policy context for research publication in South Africa, using South Africa’s relatively privileged status as an African country and its elaborated research policy environment as a testing ground for what might be achieved – or what needs to be avoided – in other African countries. The policy review takes place
against the background of a global scholarly publishing system in which African knowledge is seriously marginalised and is poorly represented in global scholarly output. Scholarly publishing policies that drive the dissemination of African research into international journals that are not accessible in developing countries because of their high cost, effectively inhibit the ability of relevant research to impact on the overwhelming development challenges that face the continent.

In this study, South African research policy is tracked against the changing context provided by digital communication technologies and new dissemination models, particularly Open Access. These impact not only on publication but also on the way that research is carried out and they bring with them a growing recognition
of the value, particularly for developing countries, of non-market and non-proprietary production in delivering research impact. The paper thus pays particular attention to the potential for new technologies and new publishing models in helping to overcome the global knowledge divide and in offering solutions for what might at first sight appear to be intractable problems of under-resourcing and a lack of sustainability for African research publication.

The argument of the paper is that there is, in the formulation of research policy, a largely uncharted clash between South African national research and innovation policies focused on development and access on the one side, and the traditionally-accepted model of academic publishing on the other. The traditional publishing model has, as its core value, enhancement of the reputation of the individual scholar and his or her institution. In following this model, South Africa is typical: there is a signal failure of research policy to focus on the question of
the swift dissemination of research results, through Open Access publishing, especially to places where these results could have a useful impact – caused by a set of largely unexamined assumptions about academic publishing. It is in the developing world, and perhaps most markedly in Africa, that the negative effect of this
set of contradictions is demonstrated most clearly.

The paper charts a set of conflicting expectations of academic institutions and their values in research policies. On the one hand, the government has an expectation of social and development impact from the university in return for its investment in research funding. At the same time, there are increased pressures towards privatisation of the universities, with a decline in traditional financial support from the state and, linked to this,
pressure on the university to demonstrate results in the form of greater Intellectual Property Rights enclosure. Thus, while South African research and innovation policies stress the need for development impact, performance measures focus on patents or publication in internationally-indexed journals, effectively inhibiting the effective
dissemination of research and thus greatly retarding its potential development impact.

The paper makes recommendations at international, national and institutional levels for addressing this situation, arguing that Open Access and collaborative approaches could bring substantially increased impact for African research, with marked cost-benefit advantages.

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

Leave a reply

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?