Dealing in Disruption

Contextualizing Policy Developments for Open Knowledge in South Africa

National Library – Ex Libris Annual Meeting 19 August 2015 Cape Town

Contextualizing Policy Developments in Open Knowledge in South Africa

Photo: Michael Horwitz- CC-BY-NC

How do we orient ourselves?

We live on a huge continent

but have a tiny share of scientific output

Science Research - 2001

http://www.worldmapper.org 2006 SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan).

Geographically?The nearest landfall?

Where are we?

Photo Turismo Bahia CC-BY-SA

Brazil with its SciELO platform is now the second biggest producer

of OA journals in the world

Alperin et al., 2008, Open access and scholarly publishing in Latin America: ten flavours and a few reflections revista.ibict.br/liinc/index.php/liinc/article/view/269/167

With support from the Department of Science and Technology, the Academy of Science runs an open access journal

platform, Scielo South Africa

Who were our traditional trading partners?

Photo – SA Tourism

A long trade history between gold-producing S and E African communities, Arabia and India

Ghandi’s printing press on Tolstoy Farm near Durban reached across continents..

AttributionNoncommercial Some rights reserved by daniel.d.slee

Colonial history and neo-colonial heritage?

Politically?

..more rigid IP regimes and the neo-colonial prohibition against parallel

importation, plus USPTO Special 301 reports targeting India have kept SA’s gaze

firmly North…

The liberation struggle was driven substantially by student movements, was reliant on protest publishing, music and art…

By Paul Weinberg (direct donation to Wikimedia Commons from Author) [CC BY-SA 3.0

Post-apartheid, two strands of policy – liberation rhetoric, Afrocentric, public benefit…

Dan Brown CC2.0

And neo-liberal policy driven by the Mineral-Energy Complex, which the ANC accommodated, resulting in an economistic approach to

publication and a market approach to research impact…

…as the Minister of Higher Education and Training confirms

The results were perverse…

We have tended to base our scholarly publishing policy on the potential for

increased impact in ‘mainstream’ ‘international’ journals..

Attribution Some rights reserved by Will Clayton

…a competitive system in which the rules are weighted agains the developing world…

… the real problem has

to do with promotion and reward systems…

AttributionNo Derivative Works Some rights reserved by ayomide!

..particularly our reliance on the ISI Impact Factor…

… and the sums of money paid from government to universities for

publication in ‘accredited’ publications..

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Real impact?

…a system in which ‘mainstream’ (i.e publishable in the index)

= ‘relevant to the English-speaking

global North’

Guédon, J. Open Access and the divide between “mainstream” and “peripheral” science, 2008. In Como gerir e qualificar revistas científicas (forthcoming , in Portuguese). (In Press) [Book Chapter].

… the other two-thirds of the world is ‘local’.

No known copyright restrictions

http://www.flickr.com/photos/adactio/ CC attribution licence

Is this a case of fatal tunnel vision?

…or is OA providing a solution?

The beginning of Open Access, in Budapest in 2002…

…OA policy has moved steadily into the mainstream…

Attribution Some rights reserved by James Cridland

…was taken up slowly in South Africa, but was seen as an answer..

...with a vision of the power of regional open networked science…

Attribution Some rights reserved by Anthony_Joel

… and a human rights approach more

appropriate to our constitution…

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Our universities, in particular, should be directing their research focus to address the

development and social needs of our communities. The impact of their research

should be measured by how much difference it makes to the needs of our communities, rather than by just how many international

citations researchers receive in their publications.

Blade Nzimande, SA Minster of Higher Education and Training, Women in Science Awards. 2010

http://www.flickr.com/photos/adactio/ CC attribution licence

Is this STILL a case of tunnel vision?

…we offer technical platforms as the solution but the scaffolding is lacking

.. In a situation in which we need to pay attention to digital librarian skills, the

availability of technical skills and infrastructure..

… in institutions hammered by successive policy changes…

AttributionNoncommercialShare Alike Some rights reserved by Peter Curbishley

…including two decades of World Bank and IMF denigration of the value of

higher education as a driver of economic growth and social development

In the UK in particular, OA has become a spat between the green..

The green route…

and the gold…

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… or the ‘gold route’ of open access journal publishing…

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In SA the SciELO approach of publicly funded and resourced platforms has paid dividends…

SciELO and SciELO South Africa have been incorporated into the

Web of Science

Alperin et al., 2008, Open access and scholarly publishing in Latin America: ten flavours and a few reflections revista.ibict.br/liinc/index.php/liinc/article/view/269/167

… but there is a problem…

AttributionNo Derivative Works Some rights reserved by ayomide!

Formal publishing is only the tip of

the iceberg -

Attribution Some rights reserved by natalielucier

…at the same time as we seek development impact for our research production…

Michelle Willmers: Willmers_Altmetricsimpact_2012-1.pdf

Something we have in fact delivered on for a long time…

.. through high quality, rigorous, development-focused research units not

properly recognised in the research reward systems…

…although in South Africa we have demonstrated the power of open social

science book publishing through the Human Science Research Council…

…whose books were downloaded in their hundreds every month, were used as educational resources, and

were downloaded in every country in the world, except Greenland

… this has now been undone by an adminstration that thinks tht

scholarly publishing makes money in Africa…

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The development of Open Education Resources is now being supported by

government in Open and Distance Learning

The answer from Open UCT was ‘Open Everything’…

… which might also provide answers to the chronic problems of

cross-border trade in books and publications…

Eve GraySenior Research Associate

IP Law UnitUniversity of Cape Town

Blog: www.gray-area.co.zaTwitter: graysouth

ReadingsSeeking Impact and Visbility: Scholarly Communication in Southern Africa http://open.uct.ac.za/handle/11427/2310The full list of SCAP reports can be found on Open UCT: open.uct.ac.za and search on scap. SciELO South Africa: www.scielo.org.zaGuédon, J. Open Access and the divide between “mainstream” and “peripheral” science, 2008. In Como gerir e qualificar revistas científicas [Book Chapter].

Links The True Size of Africa:http://static02.mediaite.com/geekosystem/uploads/2010/10/true-size-of-africa.jpg; http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/cartography