Overcoming the global knowledge divide

Open Access scholarly publications in South Africa and lessons for an Open Access

approach to data

Eve Gray27 September 2007

The Committee on Scholarly Publishing in South Africa

(CSPiSA)

Academy of Science of South Africa

Composition and mandate of CSPiSA

Representatives from a range of organisations and disciplines

Mandated to advise, monitor, and oversee the implementation of the recommendations of the ASSAf Report on Scholarly Publishing in SA

Provides a network for supporting the ASSAf scholarly publishing initiative

The ASAF Report on Scholarly Publishing in South Africa

The role of ASSAf – independent policy research

The report surveys the state of scholarly publishing and makes recommendations

Provides an overview of developments in Open Access from a developing world perspective

Scholarly publishing – in a state of rapid change

South African research policy‘The world is in the throes of a revolution that will change forever the way we live,

work, play, organise our societies and ultimately define ourselves … The ability to

maximise the use of information is now considered to be the single most important

factor in defining the competitiveness of countries as well as their ability to empower

their citizens through enhanced access to information.’

Department of Arts and Cutlure, Science and Technology: White Paper on Science and Technology, 1996

Policy needs to be forward-looking

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 … [T]he world (of science and more generally) may well evolve in such a way that present-day exemplars will be left behind. So

developing countries should set their sights on what is important in 2010, rather than what appears to be

important now – however difficult this will be politically.

Arie Rip, in A Kraak, A. (ed.) Changing Modes: New knowledge production. HSRC 2000

The rate of change

Every generation thinks it is unique, but there are nonetheless objective reasons to believe that we are witnessing an essential change in the way information is accessed, the way it is communicated to an from the general public, and among research professionals – fundamental methodological changes that will lead to a terrain 10-20 years from now more different than in any comparable time period.

Paul Ginsparg, Cornell University

The importance of dissemination

The benefits of research are derived principally from access to research results. To the extent that the dissemination of research results is less than might be from given resources, we can argue that the welfare of society is sub-optimal. Currently access to research is restricted and the means to gain access is determined by a market in which a number of publishers have a dominant position.

Wellcome Trust 2006

The challenge – the global knowledge divide

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

• Africa produced 0.4% of online content in 2002 – if South Africa is excluded, 0.02%.

• Does this mean that Africa has nothing to say?

Africa in the international journal indexes

• The major Northern scholarly journals account for 80% of articles in the Thomson indexes. 163 developing countries produce just 2.5%.

• Africa has 0.3% of the journals in the TS indexes.• 65% of African research is in local, non-indexed

journals• In 2005 there were 22 African journals among

the 3800 in Thompson Scientific indexes – 20 of these were from South Africa.

The state of South African scholarly publication

Poor international visibility - many authors get little or no international impact

An aging cohort of authors Small cluster of journals with acceptable

impact factors Most journals struggle along on voluntary

labour

ASSAf recommendations The growth of local journals, using an

Open Access model Quality management and audits of

journals A federation of institutional repositories

with national harvesting SA involvement in the development of an

expanded, more inclusive listing and indexing system

Sustainability model Institutional per article charges linked to

the national publication subsidy system Support and training for journal editors

and authors A central platform for journal

management

Advantages of Open Access• Substantial increase in reach and impact,

particularly for developing country publications• Openness decreases the risk of duplication,

removal of competition makes science less wasteful

• Science made faster, speeds up the solution of urgent development needs

• Wider reach of research, better returns for research investment

• Better monitoring, assessment and management of research

Open Access repositories

• Visibility for research output for academics and institutions, accessibility for users

• Need for standards and meta-tagging for archives to be visible on the web

• Archives can be harvested for consolidation into subject, institutional or regional collections

• More than 90% of major journals allow for pre- or post-archiving.

A success story – the HSRC Press

Open access social science research publisher - around 300 publications online

High quality print publications in parallel Now a leading global case study of OA

social sciences publishing

Research publication and research data

Journals and underlying data It is desirable to provide access to the

data sources that inform research articles Some journals aim for the integration of

data into the journal article, through internal links

However the preference is for links to outside data repositories

In general, open access is preferred, especially where public funding is concerned

Links to external data Many journals aim to provide links between

research articles and supporting data in specialist repositories

Although institutional repositories are sometimes accepted, the preference is for specialist disciplinary databases

The stability and long-term maintenance of the data is important

Open or closed Access? Proprietary and closed databases can

cause the fragmentation of data in separate 'locked-in' environment

Can lead to duplication of research Open Access databases allow for

integration and cross-disciplinary accessibility

The requirements of journals in the Nature group

Others should be able to build upon and replicate authors' claims

Authors must make data available in a publicly accessible database

The Methods section of the MS must contain details of data and restrictions

Preferred – Material Transfer Agreement form

Nature - Discipline-based data repositories

Established norms in some disciplines for deposit in disciplinary repositories – e.g crystallography, astronomy and molecular biology

The Nature Group, for example, requires deposit in established databases for mutant cells and cell lines; and for DNA sequences and molecular structures.

Other data for which there is no repository, must be provided in a stable site, or provided on a CD-ROM or DVD

The need for established structures

Certain communities have established norms, enforced by the editorial policies of their journals

An alternative – deposit by the author in an institutional repository – but this is seen as less desirable

The e-science environment encourages more rather than less access and sharing

General trends Movements towards open access to

scientific literature Towards access to underlying data Demands for greater accountability and

auditability of of science – verification, reproducibility

Efforts to improve the returns for society from scientific research

What does this mean for South Africa?

Journals – and other scholarly publication - would need to be electronic

Data repositories at national level Subject repositories that link to global

networks A more integrated approach to managing

data across publications and platforms

Future requirements Greater interactivity between the

scientific article and data Collaboratories and virtual workspaces Viewing and annotation tools working on

semantically-rich XML documents Computation – analysis, abstraction,

correlation... Open access makes this all much easier

The need to retain young researchers

Access to high-speed computing Rapid results in a national and global

community of scholars Recognition and accreditation for a wider

range of research work, including data Collaborative work in an open

environment

Copyright A single mutual licensing system for all

SA higher institutions is recommended Open licences allow better collaboration

internationally, protect the copyright work and one can set the attribution to a link-back

The draft Creative Commons licence for data has been published

Policy needs Bandwidth... and more bandwidth Review of the systems for the reward and

promotion of scholars Recognition of non-proprietary and

collaborative research output Support for metadata standards and open

licences

Linkshttp://www.assaf.org.zahttp://www.cet.ac.zahttp://blogs.uct.ac.za/blog/gray_areahttp://blogs.uct.ac.za/blog.openingscholarshiphttp://www.evegray.co.za

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