Open Access in 2012 – a developing country perspective

EADI-IMWG Workshop 13 September 2012

`Yesterday we were a bunch of activists…

I-Commons, Dubrovnik 2007

but now Open Access is in the mainstream

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..for the STM publishing industry, a ‘tsunami’…

…as high-level policy initiatives are adopted…

…based on the right of public access to publicly funded research…

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The World Bank

.. transformative uses of information..

UNESCO - OA to scientific information…

OA to increase journal impact, especially in the developing world

2010 -12 - The EU Open Aire…

Committing investment to infrastructure development for

knowledge preservation and impact

… the UK, where the Finch Report recommends investment in OA journal publishing…

http://www.researchinfonet.org/publish/finch/

Earmarking funds for encouraging publication in open access journals

… with repositories for research papers, grey literature and research data..

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 first Open Access declaration –2002

Budapest Open Access Initiative

Why is OA needed?

World Research Publication - 2001

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

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Behind this picture, hierarchies of power exerted

through a commercial journal

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

…and the emphasis is on competitiveness…

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…with the Impact Factor entrenched as the dominant global measure for

research performance…

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…there is a problem…

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…tunnel vision – only about journals

“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.”

Budapest Open Access Initiative

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Two ‘routes’ to OA - both focus on journals

.. The target is increasing exposure and impact…

And this is working - Brazil is now the 3rd largest publisher of OA

journals in the world, second only to the USA and the UK.

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

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…is this enough? How transformative is the journal focus?

In the South this month…

Formal publishing is only the tip of

the iceberg -

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SCAP project – aligning scholarly communication with national and institutional HE strategy

Institutions hammered by successive policy changes…

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

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…trying to re-establish themselves as global players in higher education…

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…yet wanting a research contribution to national development ….

…in a clash between collaborative and competitive research values…

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National policy – about moneyIn the knowledge economy

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…incentive systems are

out of line with national and institutional strategies…

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Blade Nzimande, UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education 2009

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.

What can be done?

Move scholarly communications into the policy mainstream…

Move beyond the journal…

Expand the concept of what a journal is

Work with OA publishers more sympathetic to developing country issues

Open everything – from research to teaching and learning to development impact

Recognise changing patterns of communication in networked collaborative

research…

Traditional Scholarship

Conceptualisation

Data Collection

Data Analysis

Findings

Engagement

Translation

Conceptual frameworks

Literature reviews

Bibliographies

Proposals

Data sets

Conference papers

Audio recordings

Images

Interview transcripts

Books

Reports

Journal articles

Technical papers

Notes

Presentations

Lectures

Interviews

Student

Community

Scholar

Laura Czerniewicz: The Changing Scholarly Communication and Content Landscape

Open Research

Conceptualisation

Data Collection

Data Analysis

Findings

Engagement

Translation

Conceptual frameworks

Literature reviewsBibliographi

esProposals

Data sets

Conference papers

Audio recordings

Images

Interview transcripts

Books

Reports

Journal articles Technical papers

Notes

Presentations

Lectures

Interviews

Laura Czerniewicz: The Changing Scholarly Communication and Content Landscape

A wider range of measure … Altmetrics

Take into account capacity issues in an integrated approach – technical platforms on their own do not resolve the issues…

Eve Gray Scholarly Communication in Africa

ProgrammeUniversity of Cape Town

http://www.gray-area.co.zaTwitter: graysouth