Herding dinosaurs?

South African research policy and practice in the digital age

CHED Seminar 11 October 2006

An evolutionary metaphor

A combination of new technology, outdated business models and greed threatens the survival of the current, for-profit journal publishing industry. To use an evolutionary metaphor, in the changing environment, new, smaller and more agile players

are scurrying about and yapping at the heels of the lumbering dinosaurs.

Peter Lor: Keynote address, Codesria-ASC Conference Sept 2006

Heading for extinction

Even in the well-resourced countries of the global North, scholarly publishing is facing a

very real crisis.

Are we committing our energies and resources to trying to keep dysfunctional

systems from extinction?

The International Policy Fellowships

Open Society Institute, Budapest

IPF Open Information Working Group

Advanced by the Internet, alternatives to long-standing intellectual property regimes have created an

environment to reassess the relationship between democracy, open society and new information

technologies. The promise of Open Source technology with respect to civil society and the incalculable leaps in information production by means of open content

and web logs present a new platform for civic participation. Whether and in what form such promises

can be realised lies at the basis of the questions addressed in the projects

Knowledge and development

Gross imbalances in production of and access to knowledge and cultural products – books and digital content

The knowledge divide

Africa produces around 3% of books published, but consumes around 12%.

Africa produced 0.2% of online content in 2002 – if South Africa is excluded, 0.02%.

The major Northern scholarly journals account for 80% of articles. 163 developing countries produce 2.5%.

SA has just 0.5% of the articles in Thompson Scientific indexed journals.

The body count

The impact of this global imbalance is increasingly a matter of concern in international development politics

The body un-count Village

Knowledge Centres in India – innovative uses of information networks for rural development

MS Swaminathan Research Foundation, Channai, India

Leaping the technology gap

Brazil and 'Tropicalism'

I want to face the challenge that the global cultural industry is proposing to us..

Parabolicamara brings together the word parabolic, the type of antenna that can be seen everywhere even in the poorest corners of Brazil and the word camara´, the way the players of capoeira.. have chosen to to name their partners, 'camradas', while they dance and sing

I like to see the world echoing just like the head of a berimbau. I like to connect the differences.. ..

Gilberto Gil – Minister of Culture, Brazil

What, then, does this 21st century scenario look like?

New technologies and the rise of the networked information economy are posing radical

challenges not only to knowledge development and dissemination.

The network society

The change wrought by the networked information economy is deep. A series of changes in the technologies, economic organisation and social practices of production in this environment has created new opportunities for how we make and exchange information, knowledge and culture. These changes have increased the role of non-market and and non-proprietary production, both by individuals alone and by cooperative efforts in a wide range of loosely or tightly woven collaborations.

Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (2006)

Taking up the challenge

Southern Africa as a 'network society'

The south-eastern frontier – a network society

Political power tended to be localized, boundaries fluid and vague, and the authority of chiefs highly variable. The political landscape was both homogeneous and kaleidoscopic, with widely dispersed material and symbolic resources and constantly changing political domains. Even at moments of relative stasis domains of authority very frequently overlapped. Political identities were multiple, with the fluidity of identities generally increasing with geographical distance from any given center of power... There were multiple nodes and overlapping domains of authority.... Crais 2002Custom and the Politics of Sovereignty in South Africa.

Journal of Social History 39 (3). ).

Confronting the myths

The myth of IP benefit models to the developing world

[T]he above-marginal-cost prices paid in ... poorer countries are purely regressive redistribution. The information, knowledge, and

information-embedded goods paid for would have been developed in expectation of rich world rents alone. The prospects of rents

from poorer countries do not affect their development. They do not affect either the rate or the direction of research and development.

They simply place some of the rents that pay for technology development in the rich countries on consumers in poor and

middle-income countries. The morality of this redistribution from the world's poor to the world's rich has never been confronted or defended in the European or American public spheres. It simply

goes unnoticed.

Benkler The Wealth of Networks 2006

The myth of patent revenues

Even in the USA, universities earn negligible revenues from patents

For all universities 0.56% of total revenues come from patents.

This compares with 18.5% from government grants and contracts.

Only Columbia with and Caltech have significant revenues – most are under 2% of net revenues.

Benkler The Wealth of Networks 2006, p. 340.

The reaction

Emphasis on access to knowledge

Research as a public good

Open Access declarations

Government policies on access to knowledge from public funding

The Budapest Initiative

An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual

Research policy - the need

There is a fundamental need to develop polices and strategies that would grow the output and

effective dissemination of Africa-based research in and from Africa, for African development, in the

most appropriate media and formats

Policy- making – the challenge

Policy-makers need the capacity to look forward, to plan policies that will still be viable in 2016, not

just 2006 (let alone 1996)

Policy-makers need to discern, based on their expert knowledge,

the future trajectories of the subject and the interventions that might improve its development ...

(NEPAD 2005)

'The common mimetic route is to define the nature of capacity-building in terms of what is now seen as important. This may

well be a recipe to become obsolete before one's time. The world (of science and more generally) may well evolve in such a way that present-day exemplars

will be left behind.' Arie Rip 'Lock-ins and the Heterogeneity of Knowledge Production' In

Kraak Changing Modes 2000

What does this mean for African research publication policy?

New technologies and new modes of production offer real opportunities to break the cycle of

dependency and dysfunction

The problem is the predominance in African HE policy of received, outdated

paradigms and policies

African research policy on centre stage

World Bank has changed direction – higher education now seen as a key driver for African economic growth

NEPAD calling for input into African Science and innovation facility

Funding is likely to be available for R&D Higher education policy suddenly a critical field

Policy-making - the reality

Two, clashing policy discourses

Research policy – the DST

Strong commitment to development goals and poverty reduction, research to meet national needs

Uses the language of 'Science' and 'Innovation' Acknowledges the 'African reality' and stresses the

importance of the humanities and social sciences Talks of the importance of the information revolution Promotes the idea of collaboration across disciplines,

institutions and countries

But....

Uses counts of patents and accredited journal articles as measures

Contradictory approaches to IP policy Dissemination and publication hardly appear The 'information revolution appears to apply

only to the technological vehicle, not the contents

Instrumentalist approach to communication of research findings

What would be the shape of a publication and communication policy to deliver these goals?

Research publication policy – the DoE

Talks of the need to promote research to meet development goals

Identifies the importance of the social sciences as mediators of research knowledge

Talks about the 'changing modes of disseminating research and output'

But...

'Publish or perish' and publishing by numbers The system is a mechanical one of numerical

counts – number of journal articles, number of patents

Journal articles are seen as the major output 'Originality' and personal achievement

supersede collaboration International citation indexes are the measure

of quality

The effect - a collision between a 21st century research policy environment and a 19th to 20th-century research

publication policy

Conventional scholarly publishing is not working in the developed world

'We have a scientific publishing system that is massively dysfunctional and

really, really broken.'

James Boyle, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law, Duke University, at the iCommons Summit, Rio, June 2006

Books [and journal articles].. have become in the system merely icons to be counted and worshipped, but

not looked into.'

Lindsay Waters, Humanities Editor of Harvard University Press

We forget too readily that the accepted scholarly publishing system is is not

'traditional' but a very recent invention – a combination of the massification of

education and the corresponding consolidation of publishing by media

baron Robert Maxwell

Publish or perish policies have debased the value of the scholarly book and led to a

proliferation of poor-quality journals across the world.

Commercialisation of journal production, with control in the hands of large near-monopoly conglomerates, has led to double-digit price

increases in a captive market

Universities can no longer afford their own scholarship – the 'serials crisis'

Conventional scholarly publishing works even less well in Africa

Very real barriers to dissemination within and between African countries and in the North

The 'core journal' philosophy that underlies the citation indexes marginalise even further those on

the periphery

The system works to create a 'club' that excludes outsiders through its selection processes and

value criteria

As Paul Zeleza has argued, the system is biased against women, racial

minorities and scholars from outside the metropolitan centres and is built around Western realities, paradigms and values

Why journals?

The emphasis on mainstream journals in international indices skews research priorities – critical research areas of importance to the developing world can be marginalised

Local researchers target international priorities for reasons of prestige and promotion

Restricted access to international research findings can block development needs

Local- interest research gets second-rate status Journal information out-of date by publication

An illogical model

The university provides the content (research0 It pays for the author (the time to write the

article It provides peer reviewers Often pays page charges Cedes copyright Then buys back the journals in subscriptions

that have risen four-fold in 15 years

The costs of this model

Universities ignore the real costs of their contribution

In Australia the cost of getting an article published (authoring, peer reviewing, editorial activities) is AUD19,000.00

A monograph costs AUD115,000.00 The costs of administering the evaluation and

assessment process are even higherGovernment of Australia, Department of Education, Science and Training.

Research Communication Costs in Australia: Emerging opportunities and benefits.

Some preconceptions to be dissipated

Research dissemination is not the business of universities

Scholarly publishing is all about personal promotion

Journal articles are the best way to publish research

Scholarly publishing is a profit-based business And therefore universities do not need to fund it International is by definition superior

What could an effective research policy environment for Africa look

like?

Open Access – a counter-movement

The importance of access to research knowledge, particularly when it is publicly funded

A more logical economic model Digital dissemination increases reach Massively increased impact, particularly for

content from developing countries A rapidly growing movement – now 2o,000 OA

journals

International initiatives

South Africa is a signatory to the OECD declaration on access to research data from public funding (2004)

There are now a number of international declarations – Budapest, Berlin, Bethesda, Salvador...

Governments and agencies have addressed the issues and endorsed OA in varying degrees: the UK government, the EU, WSIS, the NIH in the USA, Wellcome Trust...

The 'green' and 'gold' routes

The green route -research repositories and archives pre- and post-publication prints deposited online

(some 80% of leading journals now allow this) provision of research data underlying articles deposit of research findings and work in progress

Repositories of theses and dissertations The gold route - open access journals

Sustainability – the gains of OA

Speed of access Improved access and less duplication Faster access, leading to better informed

research Wider access – collaboration Improved education outcomes

Sustainability – impact measures

Financial measure being developed for the evaluation of the social and economic effects of

greater access

The Academy of Science Report

Proposals for a research publication strategy, commissioned by the DST

Detailed analysis of accredited journal publication

Recommends Open Access publishing Support for publishing and quality control by

ASSAf Ring-fencing of a percentage of the publication

Some elements of a good research publication policy

Public access to research knowledge Support for publication costs in research

funding Prioritization of local and African research

concerns Publications that can reflect collaborative

research and new fields Support for a wide range of research products

21st century approaches

Research is collaborative and peer-to-peer rather than individual. This adds capacity and increases immediacy

Peer review collaborative and lateral rather than hierarchical

Publish then select – publication becomes a matter of ongoing development (PLOS One)

IP law increasingly challenged as inappropriate for developing countries

Most of all, research publication needs to be put on the agenda for debate and discussion

Dissemination and publication need to be recognised as worthy of support

Research and publication skills are needed for effective dissemination

http://www.evegray.co.zahttp://blogs.uct.ac.za/blog/gray_area

http://www.policy.hu/gray